Looking for an unusual VTOL configuration ability

ArduPlane VTOL Plane
1

I remember Tridge (developer type) making note that this particular configuration of VTOL should be added but I don’t think it ever was, I read through the Quad Plane documentation and didn’t see it but I could of missed it.

Is there a configuration for:

  1. 3 motors
  2. Front two motors are vectored yaw and point forward in fixed wing flight
  3. One rear motor that tilts up and down (NOT side to side)
  4. Rear tilting motor would start by pointing down and eventually becomes a fixed pusher during fixed wing flight that points to the rear

I want this configuration in order to make the third motor a functioning part of propulsion instead of dead weight.

Is this configuration buried in all of the options somewhere?

2

This should work with a normal tritilt vectored yaw. There is a LUA script as an applet that could be used to switch off the front motors in fixed-wing mode. ardupilot/libraries/AP_Scripting/applets/forward_flight_motor_shutdown.md at master · ArduPilot/ardupilot · GitHub

Rolf

3

so:
Q_FRAME_CLASS would be 7
Q_FRAME_TYPE is ignored
Q_TILT_MASK would be 4+2+1 so 7
Q_TILT_TYPE would be 2
and then Tilt Servos would be
|TiltMotorFrontLeft = |75|
|TiltMotorFrontRight = |76|
|TiltMotorsRear = |45|

Since I would want all three motors on during all phases of flight I would not need the Lua Scripting, right?

4

I haven’t yet built a tritilt with 3 tiltable motors myself, but the way you parameterise it should work.

Rolf