EXPLORATORY DESIGN OF AN AIR LAUNCHED RECOVERABLE UAV FOR VERSATILE ROLES: A SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Autonomous / semi- autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been in use for decades e.g., target drones, cruise missiles, Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAVs etc. UAVs have demonstrated their role and importance in wide range of applications. Contemporary UAV employment concepts require multiple type of relatively inexpensive autonomous/semi-autonomous UAVs in volley quantities to undertake multiple tasks simultaneously. Air forces are increasingly counting on unmanned systems in contested environments to counter the risk of threatening technologies. In order to execute critical missions, forces require ability to send number of small UAV swarms with coordinated, distributed capabilities. This will provide them with improved operational flexibility at much lower cost as compared to expensive, manned platforms, particularly if they could be retrieved for reuse. Another desire is to have technical commonality and scalability of UAVs which will enable more efficient management of ground support equipment, training facilities etc. Scalability also allow the UAVs to be more efficient and facile enabling their features to be upgraded or down-sized as per mission requirements at much lower cost. It is inefficient to field and operate a multitude of unrelated vehicles with uncommon hardware, software, architecture. The thesis is the system level study of unmanned aerial vehicle that is air launched and is recoverable to address these futuristic employment concepts of airpower. The study has been conducted to explore desirable sub-systems and technological options that can be integrated to form envisioned air-launched UAV. Moreover, analysis of major requirements using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) has also been carried out to weigh their relative importance and to find their priority eigen vector.