Investigation of Mission Performance Sensitivities for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Parametric Similarity Assessment of Mission Requirements

Typically, civil unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used to inspect a designated area by means of onboard sensors as for instance in crop monitoring or search and track missions. The quality of the sensor data obtained during the mission has a considerable impact on the mission performance of the UAV. For an effective optimization of UAV configurations, the interaction between environment and onboard sensor equipment should be considered already in the conceptual design phase. For this purpose, a design environment has been developed to design and optimize a UAV configuration based on a provided design mission. The design mission is defined by a terrain to be inspected and a task to be performed on this terrain. During the optimization process, a mission simulation is carried out and the overall mission performance of the designs is evaluated. A mission performance index is computed which serves as objective function for the optimization. Terrain data is available which allows for the evaluation of the sensor footprint at the ground at any time during the mission simulation. One possibility to increase the efficiency of the optimization is to use known sensitivities between design variables and the objective function. This paper investigates the impact of each design variable on each mission performance metric. The analysis is conducted at two different locations in the design variable space. At each of the two locations in the design variable space, it is investigated how the sensitivities change for different mission requirements. Furthermore, by evaluating Spearman correlation coefficients, this paper investigates whether trends between sensitivities and mission requirements are apparent. Some sensitivities show a considerable variation with respect to the mission requirements. Some of the variations could be correlated to the mission requirements. Sensitivity variations which could not be correlated to the mission requirements do not exceed a spread of 12%.     «

Typically, civil unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used to inspect a designated area by means of onboard sensors as for instance in crop monitoring or search and track missions. The quality of the sensor data obtained during the mission has a considerable impact on the mission performance of the UAV. For an effective optimization of UAV configurations, the interaction between environment and onboard sensor equipment should be considered already in the conceptual design phase. For this purpose,...     »