• DOI:10.15406/aaoaj.2018.02.00047
• Corpus ID: 48364579

Design methodology for hybrid (VTOL + Fixed Wing) unmanned aerial vehicles

@inproceedings{Kamal2018DesignMF,
  title={Design methodology for hybrid (VTOL + Fixed Wing) unmanned aerial vehicles},
  author={Ashraf M. Kamal and Alex Ramirez-Serrano},
  year={2018}
}

• Ashraf M. Kamal, A. Ramirez-Serrano
• Published 6 June 2018
• Computer Science

Transitional aircraft are systems capable of flying as fixed-wing aircraft or rotorcraft as well as transition between these modes when desired/needed. Operation in helicopter mode makes the aircraft possible to Vertical Take-off and Landing (VTOL), fly at low speeds in any direction (e.g., forward and sideways), hover and perform some difficult maneuvers. In the fixed-wing mode, due to stall problems on the lifting surfaces, low speeds are not possible. However, the aircraft can make a substantial increase in range, endurance, altitude, payload carrying capacity, and maximum forward speed compared to typical rotorcraft. Therefore, Transitional Aircraft (TA) extend the aircraft flight envelope, mission, and performance of a typical aircraft by incorporating the characteristics of both helicopters and fixed-wing airplanes.1‒3 Throughout the last decades, numerous attempts have been devoted in developing TA. However, only a limited number of successful aircraft have been realized and relatively successful systems still present numerous challenges as they do not operate optimally.4 Diverse concepts have been examined/developed in previous works in an attempt to find better designs.5 The most