Rotary wing UAV potential application: an analytical study through a matrix method

Industrial designers often need decision-making methods to develop innovative solutions combining specified customer’s requirements with project technical constraints. This paper describes a matrix approach as a technique to support designer from the very beginning of product development in which the main decisions must be taken. In this work the matrix method has been used to analyze the civil UAV potential market and particularly for selecting the most promising applications of a multi-role Rotary Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (RWUAV). According to the matrix results two rotary wing multi-role missions have been chosen as most promising customer attractive applications. This matrix method can also be improved for subsequent decision-making in preliminary-configuration analysis since it can be easily tailored to different specific engineering applications.