An New Airframe Design Methodology for Safety-Critical UAV

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technologies have the potential to contribute to Canada’s resilience against climate and health crises and change people’s daily lives. Specific examples of use could be firefighting, land erosion mapping, the fast delivery of vaccines in the north of Canada, flying ambulances, defibrillators for emergency calls. These applications are challenging in many aspects. Two of the biggest challenges are reliability for safety and energy efficiency for competitive performance. Failures leading to an uncontrollable vehicle can cause catastrophic accidents if the vehicle collides with humans, aircraft, helicopters, or infrastructure. Therefore, safety-critical UAVs must be designed to minimize the probability of critical failures and maintain a safe operation if they occur. The airframe generally is the main contributor to the total mass of medium the size UAVs and thus a primary drivers of energy efficiency. Therefore, the emergence of UAVs for demanding applications will depend on the designers’ ability to optimize the UAV airframe early in the design process. The proposed research aims to develop a novel airframe design methodology. The novelty will be to include safety and reliability considerations in the conceptual design and integrate the methodology in a multidisciplinary framework for UAV design.

Faculty Supervisor:

Jonathan Liscouet

Student:

Partner:

Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Education

University:

Concordia University

Program: