1 A Systems Engineering Approach to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Design M. Sadraey 1 Daniel Webster College Nashua, NH, 03063 Complex UAV systems, due to the high cost and the risks associated with their development become a prime candidate for the adoption of systems engineering methodologies. A successful UAV designer needs not only a good understanding of design, but also systems engineering approach. The design of a UAV begins with the requirements definition and extends through functional analysis and allocation, design synthesis and evaluation, and finally validation. An optimized UAV, with a minimum of undesirable side effects, requires the application of an integrated life-cycle oriented “system” approach. In this paper, conceptual design, preliminary design and detail design of an UAV based on systems engineering approach are introduced. In each stage, application of this approach is described by presenting the design flow chart and practical steps of design. A fair amount of the paper is devoted to the detail design phase. I. Introduction Research in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has grown in interest over the past couple decades. There has been tremendous emphasis in unmanned aerial vehicles, both of fixed and rotary wing types over the past decades. Historically, UAVs were designed to maximize endurance and range, but demands for UAV designs have changed in recent years. Applications span both civilian and military domains, the latter being the more important at this stage. Early statements about performance, operation cost, and manufacturability are highly desirable already early during the design process. Individual technical requirements have been satisfied in various prototype, demonstrator and initial production programs like Predator, Global Hawk and other international programs. The possible break- through of UAV technology requires support from the aforementioned awareness of general UAV design requirements and their consequences on cost, operation and performance of UAV systems. Te design principles for UAV‟s are similar to the principles developed over the years and used successfully for the design of manned aircraft. The size of UAV varies according to the purpose of their utility. In many cases the design and constructions of UAV‟s faces new challenges and, as a result of these new requirements, several recent works (Ref. 1) are concerned with the design of innovative UAV‟s. Autonomous vehicle technologies for small fixed-wing UAVs were presented by Ref. 2. The long endurance UAV development was discussed in Ref. 3. Unmanned aerial vehicle conceptual design using a genetic algorithm and data mining was introduced in Ref. 4. Ref. 5 examines some consequences of UAV design requirements especially on UAV modeling and simulation. Comprehensive aircraft preliminary design methodology was applied to the design of MALE UAV in Ref. 6. Ref. 7 and 8 address the optimization and conceptual design of Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAV using multi objective genetic algorithm. The first UAV designs that appeared in the early nineties were based on the general design principles for full aircraft and findings of experimental investigations. The main limitation of civil UAV‟s is often low cost. An important area of UAV technology is the design of autonomous systems. The tremendous increase of computing 1 Assistant Professor, School of Engineering, 109E Daniel Webster Hall 10th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations (ATIO) Conference 13 - 15 September 2010, Fort Worth, Texas AIAA 2010-9302 Copyright © 2010 by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. All rights reserved.