A novel bi-rotor configuration that uses reaction wheels to control the system attitude (roll and yaw) is presented in this article. This configuration exploits the fact that moment of inertia about the axis connection the two rotors (roll axis) is significantly less compared to moment of inertia about the other two orthogonal axes (pitch and yaw axes). A detailed mathematical model of the proposed configuration is presented. PD controllers are used to control the attitude and position of the system. Particle swarm optimization is used to obtain the controller gains and also to infer the role of actuator dynamics on system performance. The simulation results for attitude, position command tracking and way-point trajectory tracking are shown to demonstrate the performance of the proposed configuration. © 2018