Preliminary weight estimation of canister based light foldable wing electric propulsion UAV, as a platform for swarm applications

Abstract

Lots of disruptive UAV technologies are rising every day. Especially in the design process, under the prism of the upcoming swarm trend, a novelty touch to new foldable designs has started. In combination with electric propulsion systems, those platforms come in reality. Because of their size, the same design can be enlarged and reduced with minor changes at its subsystems. This simplifies the construction process and minimizes the costs. Due to their application range both, civilian and military platforms started to develop their own foldable UAVs, basically for swarm applications. In this study, the basic parameters of such a scalable design will be proposed. A literature survey will be presented, to determine the most common sizes of those platforms and the battery market availability. Afterwards, a mission profile will form the basis of the conceptual process for different dimensional UAVs. Two different methods about the weight estimation of the UAV will be examined. The goal of this multilateral examination is that; enable the designer to precede to an appropriate selection of subsystems of the UAVs, i.e., battery, autopilot and telemetry systems based on the weight estimation.