Unlocking Stopped-Rotor Flight: Development and Validation of SPERO, a Novel UAV Platform

Stop-rotor aircraft have long been proposed as the ideal vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) aircraft for missions with equal time spent in both flight regimes, such as agricultural monitoring, search and rescue, and last-mile delivery. Featuring a central lifting surface that rotates in VTOL to generate vertical thrust and locks in forward flight to generate passive lift, the stop-rotor offers the potential for high efficiency across both modes. However, practical implementation has remained infeasible due to aerodynamic and stability conflicts between flight modes. In this work, we present SPERO (Stopped-Penta Rotor), a stop-rotor uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) featuring a flipping and latching wing, an active center of pressure mechanism, thrust vectored counterbalances, a five-rotor architecture, and an eleven-state machine flight controller coordinating geometric and controller reconfiguration. Furthermore, SPERO establishes a generalizable design and control framework for stopped-rotor UAVs. Together, these innovations overcome longstanding challenges in stop-rotor flight and enable the first stable, bidirectional transition between VTOL and forward flight.