Original title: Dynamic System Emulation: Fixed Wing Dynamics on a Multicopter
Abdelhakim Amer, Andriy Sarabakha · September 2026
Fixed-wing airplanes are hard to test and use for training because they must keep moving forward to stay airborne and cannot turn freely in any direction. Multicopters are much easier to handle. Researchers created a control system that makes a multicopterA drone with multiple rotors that can hover and move in any direction., fitted with a two-axis gimbalA pivoted mount that can tilt in two perpendicular directions, often used to steady a camera., mimic the flight motion of a fixed-wing plane. The gimbal is a pivoting support that rotates on two axes. To make this work, the system maps the plane's motions and control inputs onto the multicopter using a mathematical technique called dynamic feedback linearizationA control technique that simplifies a complex system's behavior by adjusting inputs based on the current state to make it behave linearly.. The team tested the setup on typical airplane flight manoeuvres in computer simulations. They found that the multicopter matched the plane's movements with high fidelity under nominal conditions.
You are learning to drive a car with a manual transmission. It is tricky because you must coordinate clutch and gear changes perfectly to avoid stalling. Now imagine you could practice on a simplified automatic car that perfectly mimics the manual car's response, but without the risk of stalling. Here, the drone is the automatic car, and the airplane is the manual car. The control framework makes the drone fly exactly like the airplane.
Pilot training and drone autonomy research often need costly fixed-wing aircraft. This control framework lets a multicopter mimic those flight dynamics, making training cheaper and safer. Researchers can test fixed-wing algorithms on a stable, easy-to-deploy drone.
The abstract states that evaluations are conducted in simulation and results are under nominal conditions. It does not present real-world hardware tests, nor does it address robustness to disturbances like wind or sensor noise. The path to hardware deployment is described as practical but not yet realized.
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Dynamic System Emulation: Fixed Wing Dynamics on a Multicopter — Abdelhakim Amer, Andriy Sarabakha
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.