A tiltable ducted fan flying car for Urban Air Mobility (UAM)

Abstract

Flying cars are emerging as a key technological solution for developing Urban Air Mobility (UAM) due to their three-dimensional transportation capabilities. Various aerodynamic layout forms have been developed for flying cars. Among them, multi-rotor layout is highly coupled between control force and torque due to the underdrive characteristics, while fixed-wing and thrust vector layouts face structural complexity and weight challenges. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a novel tiltable ducted fan flying car for UAM. The design adopts a cross-shaped aerodynamic layout with four independently tilting ducted fans arranged at the end of the arm. The system realizes precise control of fan speed and inclination angle through distributed drive, while providing both control force and torque. This design combines structural compactness and omnidirectional drive capability. Then, the paper covers powertrain architecture planning, aerodynamic parameter design and structural design of the tilting mechanism. A dynamic model of the system is established, and an over-actuated control strategy based on the pseudo-inverse method is proposed to realize the decoupled control of force and torque. Finally, simulations using MATLAB/Simulink demonstrate that the position tracking errors in the x, y, and z axes are less than 1 m, and the attitude angle error is below 0.5°. These results validate the excellent performance of the designed flying car in terms of attitude control accuracy and dynamic response.