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Following current trends towards UAV innovative designs, a small size light UAV was designed, constructed and tested in flight. The purpose of this light UAV aircraft is to serve as a reconnaissance plane capable of carrying state-of-the-art photography and video equipment. The UAV is also equipped with first person view (FPV) systems for easier and more accurate control by a remote user. For the initial configuration, apart from classical conceptual design procedures, some new relations were developed and used. For the preliminary design, linear aerodynamic performance and stability analysis was carried out first. Next, the aerodynamic characteristics and efficiency of the airfoil section, the wing, and the full configuration were evaluated using CFD. Finally, further improvements of the aerodynamic efficiency of the full configuration were carried out through computational optimization.

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The advantages of multidisciplinary design are well understood, but not yet fully adopted by the industry where methods should be both fast and reliable. For such problems, minimum computational cost while providing global optimality and extensive design information at an early conceptual stage is desired. However, such a complex problem consisting of various objectives and interacting disciplines is associated with a challenging design space. This provides a large pool of possible designs, requiring an efficient exploration scheme with the ability to provide sufficient feedback early in the design process. This paper demonstrates a generalized optimization framework with rapid design space exploration capabilities in which a Multifidelity approach is directly adjusted to the emerging needs of the design. The methodology is developed to be easily applicable and efficient in computationally expensive multidisciplinary problems. To accelerate such a demanding process, Surrogate Based Optimization methods in the form of both Radial Basis Function and Kriging models are employed. In particular, a modification of the standard Kriging approach to account for Multifidelity data inputs is proposed, aiming to increasing its accuracy without increasing its training cost. The surrogate optimization problem is solved by a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm and two constraint handling methods are implemented. The surrogate model modifications are visually demonstrated in a 1D and 2D test case, while the Rosenbrock and Sellar functions are used to examine the scalability and adaptability behaviour of the method. Our particular Multiobjective formulation is demonstrated in the common RAE2822 airfoil design problem. In this paper, the framework assessment focuses on our infill sampling approach in terms of design and objective space exploration for a given computational cost.