  Mars has been a prime candidate for planetary exploration of the solar system
because of the science discoveries that support chances of future habitation on
this planet. Martian caves and lava tubes like terrains, which consists of
uneven ground, poor visibility and confined space, makes it impossible for
wheel based rovers to navigate through these areas. In order to address these
limitations and advance the exploration capability in a Martian terrain, this
article presents the design and control of a novel coaxial quadrotor Micro
Aerial Vehicle (MAV). As it will be presented, the key contributions on the
design and control architecture of the proposed Mars coaxial quadrotor, are
introducing an alternative and more enhanced, from a control point of view
concept, when compared in terms of autonomy to Ingenuity. Based on the
presented design, the article will introduce the mathematical modelling and
automatic control framework of the vehicle that will consist of a linearised
model of a co-axial quadrotor and a corresponding Model Predictive Controller
(MPC) for the trajectory tracking. Among the many models, proposed for the
aerial flight on Mars, a reliable control architecture lacks in the related
state of the art. The MPC based closed loop responses of the proposed MAV will
be verified in different conditions during the flight with additional
disturbances, induced to replicate a real flight scenario. In order to further
validate the proposed control architecture and prove the efficacy of the
suggested design, the introduced Mars coaxial quadrotor and the MPC scheme will
be compared to a PID-type controller, similar to the Ingenuity helicopter's
control architecture for the position and the heading.
