ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Aerosp. Res. Commun.
A Minimum Snap Flight Transition Strategy for Quadrotor Tail-sitter UAVs: Altitude-hold Transition
Mingyue Fan
Yifan Xia
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
Article metrics
2
Views
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Abstract
This paper studies the altitude-hold flight mode transition problem for tail-sitter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) between hovering and level flight. The problem is significantly challenging because of the complicated nonlinear aerodynamics of the tail-sitter UAV during the transition process. This paper proposes a minimum snap trajectory generation method and a model predictive control (MPC) based tracking strategy for this problem. Firstly, the generated trajectory are highly applicable, satisfying the dynamic constraint. Secondly, MPC tracks full states by solving a finite-horizon optimization at each step to yield the best future behavior based on the system model. A numerical simulation is conducted, in which the altitude change is less than 1.4 m during the entire transition process.
Summary
Keywords
Autonomous aerial vehicles, altitude-hold transition, vehicle dynamics, flight mode transition control, tail-sitter UAVs
Received
21 August 2025
Accepted
06 November 2025
Copyright
© 2025 Fan and Xia. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Yifan Xia, xiayifan@zju.edu.cn
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.