Autonomous UAV Aerodynamic Performance Analysis for the Near-Ship Environment

The overall goal of this STTR program is to develop an efficient, high-fidelity, CFD-based design tool for the simulation of ship-board flight testing of autonomous UAV systems. In Phase I, an overall flight simulation framework that employs a modular approach to the flight simulation problem was developed. The effort was successful in demonstrating a lower-cost aerodynamic modeling approach that can model a representative UAV rotorcraft recovering to a ship, with accuracy to within 20% of fully-coupled CFD methods and an order of magnitude reduction in simulation time/cost. The proposed Phase II program will address key improvements to the technology developed in Phase I that will permit its use for the simulation of autonomous UAV launch and recovery operations, namely the implementation of detailed rotor and flight controller models into the simulation framework. This development will be carried out in a comprehensive manner with companion experiments at the University of Florida designed to provide experimental data to validate the various components of the simulation software.