Design, Performance-Based Optimization (PBO), and Actual Development of Unmanned High-Speed Aerial Vehicle

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are important to perform a wide range of operations. In order to ensure mission success, UAVs need to be agile and to have a robust design having good longitudinal and lateral stability characteristics. In this paper, we have provided a comprehensive and open architecture design scheme for design and development of an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of carrying out various missions. This work presents two different designs of such aerial platform which includes Flight Dynamic Modeling, aerodynamic parameters estimation using high fidelity numerical techniques involving Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and USAF DATCOM. These designs are then subjected to 6 Degrees of Freedom (DOF) simulation environments for assessing their performance in different flight scenarios. A Performance Based optimization (PBO) is then carried out in order to optimize existing design and come up with improved model parameters. These optimized designs are then passed through a stringent selection criteria for selecting a design for development