Flight Testing for Flight Dynamics Estimation of Medium-Sized UAVs.

The Institute of Aircraft Design of Technical University of Munich designs, builds and tests Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with take-off weights of up to 65~kg for the purpose of technology demonstration in flight. This purpose often leads to the incorporation of uncommon features. With growing size and unconventional features, the domain of validity of empiric design and analysis methods, often derived either from smaller UAVs or larger, manned aircraft, is left. Therefore a design-data based tool-chain for the estimation of dynamic properties in early design of medium-sized UAVs with take-off weights between 25~kg and 150~kg is being developed. For the identification of suitable methods and tools as well as models, a case study is conducted applying them to an instrumented UAV of type \textit{CARF-Models Ltd.} DG-800~S. In order to create an aerodynamic data-set for reference, a testing infrastructure is set up and flight tests are conducted. The data evaluation focuses on the rigid body modes. The identified poles of each test point are plotted on a pz-map. While the distribution of poles of the dutch role presents expected behavior, the poles of the short period mode exhibit considerable scatter.      «

The Institute of Aircraft Design of Technical University of Munich designs, builds and tests Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with take-off weights of up to 65~kg for the purpose of technology demonstration in flight. This purpose often leads to the incorporation of uncommon features. With growing size and unconventional features, the domain of validity of empiric design and analysis methods, often derived either from smaller UAVs or larger, manned aircraft, is left. Therefore a design-data based...     »