Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL) multi-rotor rotary-wing vehicles face many challenges such as harsh weather conditions and low endurance which affect their overall performance and usability. The current usage of these types of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAVs) has changed to an urban and cluttered environment, which the larger fixed-wing UAVs cannot access and gain the required data. With interesting flight regimes such as perching, small man-portable UAVs have found their way into the military and the ever growing civilian sector. This paper aims to provide a method of setting design parameters for a reconfigurable perching element, which replaces the current landing gear on a VTOL UAV which has a maximum take-off mass (MTOM) of <1.5 kg. These design parameters are used to create concepts along with various different grasping methods to cover the design solution space. A weighted matrix method was applied for the design selection and optimisation process, where carefully selected criteria and weightings were chosen to give the VTOL UAV the ability to perch on top of lighting columns, which are a common form of street furniture found in most urban environments.
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Development of a Novel Platform for Greater Situational Awareness in the Urban Military TerrainStephen D. Prior emphasized the need for novel platforms which provide for greater situational awareness in the urban terrain. Without intelligent systems, which can accurately provide real-time information, collateral damage to property will result, together with unnecessary civilian deaths. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that within the next decade 75% of the world's population will be living in urban areas. This paper outlines the current state of unmanned aerial vehicles throughout the world and presents a novel design of a multiple rotary wing platform which has great potential for both military and civilian application areas.
This paper presents an investigation into the noise produced by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The platform used, 'Spotter', is a fixed-wing, light UAV comprising a 4-meter wingspan. Spotter was originally designed to perform long-endurance, all-weather patrol missions in coastal and maritime environments. This vehicle has been continuously upgraded and is now used in a broader range of applications. Increasing demand by research and industrial partners, as well as the UK Civil Certification Authority (CAA) has led to a survey of the Spotter's in-flight noise footprint. The CAA Operating Safety Case of this platform is currently being updated and the major findings are presented in the paper. Preliminary results were obtained in flight tests performed at the Draycot Aerodrome over two expeditions in the summer of 2021, in the UK. A series of flyovers, takeoff and landing operations were measured. Flyovers were performed at constant altitude at series of power settings, incrementing from low to maximum power output. These measurements are then used to generate Noise-Power-Distance curves for the Spotter UAV. Static directivity characteristics of the dual propeller setup were also measured, with intent of feeding into future airport exposure studies.
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