Attritable Short Range Reconnaissance VTOL Group 1 UAS

Improving the bottom end of short ranged reconnaissance UAS has potentially significant commercialization opportunities in the civilian market. Drone photography is one of the fastest growing market spaces in aviation, currently at 13.76 billion USD at the beginning of 2024, with a year over year growth forecast of 25% and climbing. Civilian commercialization of the drone proposed here would provide an affordable platform with significantly improved flight endurance due to its VTOL capability. Many industries already make use of such drones for inspection, survey, landscape photography, security, and recreation, and there is market opportunity in any of them to commercialize a novel, affordable UAS design. Further commercial benefits may stem from research data gathered from the development of this project, which has potential to inform further commercial developments of cameras, flight control subsystems, precision landing equipment, or even larger UAS. All of these subsystems contribute considerably to the growing market of camera-equipped UAS worldwide, and the development of a larger UAS may also bring this technology into a position where it can be used in another growing market: drone delivery. The idea of using VTOL drones for deliveries appeals greatly for many reasons, the largest of which is the combination of both precision and endurance. Fixed wing aircraft have much greater flight times than rotorcraft, owing to their innate aerodynamic lift, but require runways to take off and land. By using a VTOL aircraft built around an efficient fixed wing airframe, an efficient delivery drone with the precision landing capability of a multicopter could enter the market and potentially dominate. DropDrone’s proposed solution is to develop a compact, low cost, lightweight VTOL UAS platform for general purpose micro UAS tasks, and perform a feasibility study on the additional costs and limits around miniaturizing components of this UAS to further reduce its carry volume and weight. The end product of a Phase 2 prototyping effort would be a small VTOL UAS capable of carrying multiple cameras for visible light, low light, and infrared observation, as well as instruments and a flight controller that will allow it to perform fully autonomous missions, flying to designated waypoints and returning camera data to a ground control station. This ground control station can then use local computer vision algorithms to identify threats, targets, or other objects of interest to the operator, in real time. Based on customer discovery information from Phase I, the Phase II prototype of the solution will be tailored towards either reduced size and weight, or reduced production costs, as this will be the primary engineering trade during development.