Unmanned aerial systems can be used in number of civil applications, such as surveillance, search and rescue, precision agriculture, civil infrastructure inspection, remote sensing and etc. The mission fulfillment grade of these missions depends on UAV flight performance, sensor parameters, energy consumption, communication abilities and is determined by the initial mission requirements. To get an effective UAS solution it is necessary to take into account all elements of the system, e.g. to bring together aircraft design, payload, communication and other elements into one multidisciplinary design process. Owing to the elevation model and realistic representation of the terrain, the visualization environment models the sensor payload performance, communication capabilities and the physical world where the UAS is performing the mission. It provides information concerning sensor coverage area, probabilities of object detection, number of detected objects, slant range between the UAV and search objects, obstacles detection in the line-of-sight and time of communication losses. These information are involved into the mission evaluation process and into the UAS design optimization. An application study for the methodology is presented by a civil UAS search and rescue mission in a mountain area. During the mission simulation in the virtual operational environment the key evaluation criteria are obtained and involved into the UAS assessment and design process. Using the methodology presented in the paper, an UAV can be optimized with regard to mission requirements already in the early stages of the design process.     «

Unmanned aerial systems can be used in number of civil applications, such as surveillance, search and rescue, precision agriculture, civil infrastructure inspection, remote sensing and etc. The mission fulfillment grade of these missions depends on UAV flight performance, sensor parameters, energy consumption, communication abilities and is determined by the initial mission requirements. To get an effective UAS solution it is necessary to take into account all elements of the system, e.g. to bri...     »