One of the biggest shortcomings of traditional quadcopters is that they are underactuatedwith control over only 4 out of a possible 6 degrees of freedom. The user may control
translations in all three axes as well as a single rotation in the Z axis, otherwise known
as yaw. A handful of designs have been introduced in the field to gain control of the two
remaining degrees of freedom, as gaining control of them would mean complete control over
the quadcopter’s attitude and position, a useful feature in certain applications. This work
delves deeper into a design introduced in a previous work, of an overactuated quadcopter
design with twelve system inputs, where each arm has 3 control inputs – propeller speed,
a twist angle, and a tilt angle. A system identification of the quadcopter is completed
using an experimental setup that dissects the quadcopter into a modular part – a single-
arm. Furthermore, a multibody dynamic simulation of the complete quadcopter is created
which accounts for the system’s mass distribution, moments of inertia, and low level motor
dynamics which were simplified or ignored in previous work. In addition to the previously
proposed control scheme, a new scheme is also introduced which simplifies the system into a
6 input to 6 output system, thus creating a more simple and elegant control scheme. Both
control schemes are tested in simulation and experiment with success.