Manufacturing and Flight Testing of a Vertical Tailless Blended Wing-Body UAV Design

This paper presents the manufacturing and flight-testing of a custom-designed vertical tailless blended wing-body unmanned aerial vehicle that is tailored towards performing search & rescue missions. The vehicle is designed to carry a camera for object recognition and autonomous payload drop mechanism for rescue missions. The paper discusses the trade studies and research on aerodynamics, weight & balance, sizing, structures, propulsion, stability & control, and payload drop system. The lack of vertical tail imposes the need for implementing a non-traditional system to stabilize and control the aircraft. Crow braking and differential thrust were used for the directional control of the aircraft. SolidWorks, Finite Element Analysis (FEA), Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and stability and control simulation programs such as XFLR5 were used for design, analysis, and design changes prior to manufacturing the vehicle. Once found satisfactory in simulations and analyses, the aircraft is built from the ground up using simple composite materials. Several prototypes were built and flight-tested to further improve the design. The final design satisfied all the design requirements. Simulation and flight test results are discussed.