Preliminary Design Correlations and Cost Estimation for Fixed-Wing Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

In most nations’ plans for military air force, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to cover a broad spectrum of missions, significantly extending their capabilities from reconnaissance operations to high-level tactical missions alongside next generation fighters. In order to take into account this forthcoming wide variety of flight envelopes and mission requirements, new conceptual tools for rapid and accurate designs of such vehicles are required. Based upon an in-house database of fixed-wing UAVs, this paper is a two-fold study that aims to provide pre-sizing correlations and introduce a cost estimation tool for the preliminary design of military UAVs. Statistical analysis is first performed to extract a set of comprehensive relations for mass and geometrical parameters. The various emerging UAVs designs collected in the database lead to split the vehicles into four categories: Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles, Loyal Wingmen, Remote Carriers and Tactical UAVs. In addition to the overall relations, simplified analytical models are specifically obtained for each group, enabling more precise, category-oriented results. Furthermore, a machine learning model is built in order to provide cost estimation for those platforms. This model allows to compare the different architectures of UAVs regarding the flyaway cost. Overall, as required during early design stages, the models described in this paper bring insightful data for simple and time-effective preliminary UAV evaluation.