DEVELOPMENT OF A MULTIDISCIPLINARY ANALYSIS TOOL FOR DRONE DESIGN

In the last decade, we have witnessed the boom in the production of drones, that are unmanned aircraft. The exponential growth of the presence of drones in our skies is mainly due to their constant technological advancement and to the fact that their applications have increasingly diversified and are continuing to do so at an impressive rate. Today drones no longer have only military or modeling purposes, but they have proved to be very useful, sometimes indispensable, in many other contexts, among these we find agriculture, public order, filmography, photography and recently they are developing drones for the delivery of goods. Given the diversity of the fields of use of these aircraft, the loads to be transported, the flight times and the altitudes reached vary from application to application and from mission to mission. The purpose of my Master's Thesis is to provide the designer with a tool to perform the exploration of the design space of a drone, given high-level requirements such as the payload mass and the flight autonomy. The tool helps the designer identifying the design solutions to fulfill the requirements in terms of system level architecture and subsystem level components. To do this I have developed a MatLab tool which, knowing some mission parameters, such as payload and required autonomy, provides indications for the choice of batteries, motors, propellers and controllers to be used.