Aerodynamic design, performance evaluation and full scale fabrication of a micro air vehicle (MAV)

Abstract

The design and development of small scale aerial robots has been currently hindered by the lack of applicability of conventional aerodynamics equations/principles to the small size vehicles flying at extremely low Reynolds number. Also conventional optimization techniques and algorithms have shown very limited success in these applications. Trial and error has been the most effective design tool in many cases often leading to computationally intensive and expensive design processes with longer iteration time. The non-availability of physics based analytical tools and the computational expense of numerical methods makes an empirical design optimization approach a practical alternative. This current research effort has been based on identification & application of physics based tools to evolve a Modeling & Simulation environment, in which such a design effort is possible.