Unmanned aerial vehicle derivative design optimization based on light sport aircraft

Manufacturers often develop new products by modifying and extending existing products in order to achieve new market demands while minimizing development time and manufacturing costs. In this research, an efficient derivative design process was developed to efficiently adapt existing aircraft designs according to new requirements. The proposed design process was evaluated using a case study that derives an unmanned aerial vehicle design from a baseline manned 2-seatlight sport aircraft. Multiple unmanned aerial vehicle operational scenarios were analysed to define the requirements of the derivative aircraft. These included patrol, environmental monitoring, and communications relay missions. Each mission has different requirements and therefore each resulting derivative unmanned aerial vehicle design has different geometry, devices, and performance. The derivative design process involved redefining the design requirements and identifying the minimum design variable set that needed to be considered in order to efficiently adapt the baseline design. Uncertainty was considered as well to enhance the reliability of the optimized result when it considered different conditions for each mission. An optimization method based on the possibility based design optimization was proposed to handle uncertainty that arises in the design requirements for the multi-role nature of unmanned aerial vehicles. In this paper, the possibility based design optimization method was implemented with multidisciplinary design optimization technique to derive the derivative unmanned designs based on originally manned aircraft. This approach prevented constraint violation via uncertainty variations in the operating altitude and payload weight for each. The unmanned aerial vehicle derivative designs satisfying the requirements of three different missions were derived from the proposed design process.