Operational & technical design aspects of future civil roraty wing UAVs

This paper presents some main results of the coaxial rotor configuration design group of the EU funded CAPECON project. CAPECON, launched by the European Commission in 2001, aims at providing civil UAV customers with cost-effective and safe configurations. Starting from a market survey, moving through the definition of two most promising multi-role missions using a matrix-method, the first part of the job ended with the definition of two operational concepts: these concepts were used as main requirements for the following configuration phase. Two rotorcraft configurations, a classical tail-rotor/main-rotor configuration and a coaxial configuration that matched the requirements, were chosen. The coaxial configuration was then sized and some work was performed on coaxial helicopter modelling in order to improve the performances prediction. At the same time, a Ground Control Station (GCS), for helicopter flight control and onboard payload data display, was developed. A preliminary Safety / Reliability calculation was also performed for Rotary Wing UAV Mission. Finally, a Life Cycle Cost (LCC) model was developed, including all parameters for the total operating cost of rotary wing civil UAVs. A matrix for the acquisition and operating costs of the UAV configurations was also established.