State-Of-The-Art And Directions For The Conceptual Design Of Safety-Critical Unmanned And Autonomous Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned and Autonomous Aerial Vehicles (UAV/AAV) must be safe and reliable to prevent catastrophic accidents in population-dense areas. The study reveals the absence of a comprehensive UAV/AAV design for reliability approach in the open literature; in particular, there is no conceptual design methodology including safety and reliability considerations in the sizing. This finding leads to investigating the relevance of pursuing this research direction and identifying the challenges to address. For this matter, a straightforward approach combining sizing, systematic redundancy, controllability, and reliability assessments compares a conventional to a redundant design in a case study. The reliability analysis confirms that the redundant design is fault-tolerant and potentially highly reliable. However, the total mass almost doubles due to the lack of sizing and redundancy optimization. Plus, there is a high risk of under-sizing due to the limitations of a straightforward approach. This result emphasizes the need to develop a new conceptual design methodology based on sizing, including safety and reliability considerations. The paper concludes with research directions towards this goal. Thus, optimized redundant designs will contribute to the emergence of UAV/AAV for safety-critical applications in the near future.