Powertrain Design for Hand-Launchable Long Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper describes methods for design of a hand-launchable, back-packable unmanned aerial vehicle for long endurance flight. The proposed design methods involve the development of empirical and physicsbased contributing analyses to model the performance of the aircraft subsystems. The contributing analyses are collected into a design structure matrix which is used to map aircraft performance metrics as a function of design variables over a defined design space. The results of the design process are used to construct a demonstration hand-launchable, back-packable aircraft. Test results from the demonstration aircraft and its subsystems are compared to predicted results to validate the contributing analyses and improve their accuracy in further design iterations.