Approach to shaping the technical appearance of an unmanned aerial vehicle

The article focuses upon the substantiation of efficiency criterion at formation of technical shape of an unmanned aerial vehicles. The authors analyze the criteria of efficiency of applying unmanned aerial vehicles, such as relative weight, flight time, unit cost of flight and life cycle cost and provide reasoning for the necessity of using the combined criterion considering economic and functional efficiency. Variable, non-variable and uncertain parameters characterizing an unmanned aerial vehicles are formulated. The optimization problem of determining the technical appearance is considered. The process of technical appearance formation is based on three interrelated processes: aerodynamic arrangement; volume-mass arrangement and structural-force arrangement. The purpose of the technical appearance is to find such interrelated values of the parameters of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which ensure the achievement of a compromise between the requirements while ensuring the extreme of any selected generalized criterion of optimality, for example, the minimum cost of the life cycle of the finished product - the aircraft. This criterion is one of the most general criteria for aircraft efficiency, but it is difficult to calculate it at an early stage of development. Therefore, in practice, it uses other criteria that are close to the cost of the life cycle stages. The specific feature of the process of UAV glare formation, as well as any complex technical system, is a large number of unknown and high degree of uncertainty, especially at the early stages of development. To overcome this uncertainty, the design process is divided into a series of successive iterative stages. The task of searching for the most advantageous combination of UAV design parameters depending on its purpose can be considered as the task of searching for the extremum of some target function - optimization task. Based on the conducted substantiation the authors propose the technique of defining the rational appearance of an unmanned aerial vehicles, considering the accepted restrictions.