A Compact and Agile Fixed-Wing UAS for VTOL Shipboard Operations

Commercially available unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are not well designed to meet requirements for many atmospheric measurement applications, including deployment from ships, long endurance, and low cost. Multi-rotor UASs have recently gained popularity as a lowcost platform use in measurement and monitoring applications, but these systems have limited endurance and payload capabilities. Existing fixed wing systems offer improved endurance and payload capabilities but are expensive and have not been optimized for shipboard deployment and recovery. Existing systems that are deployed from ships require significant support hardware and require high-risk recovery tactics, such as catching the aircraft in a net or by a wingtip-mounted arrester hook. To meet this need, Creare proposes a low cost and compact vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) UAS named the “Hi-Dive.” The Hi-Dive UAS takes off vertically, ascends to a safe altitude for transitions to horizontal flight, and reverses thrust using variable-pitch propellers to fly in a pusher prop configuration. In Phase I, we will demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed approach through design, analysis, and testing of critical system components. In Phase II, we will develop, test, and validate a prototype of the system and demonstrate its performance and value in a field test.