Conceptual Design of Medium Altitude Long Endurance UAV Using Multi Objective Genetic Algorithm
Soorya Rajagopal, Ranjan Ganguli, Ajit C. Pillai, A Lurdharaj · 48th AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics, and Materials Conference · 2007
This paper investigates UAV conceptual design using optimization methods. The conceptual design of a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAV is formulated as two different optimization problems. The optimization problems use a single objective and dual objective functions. For the single objective case, endurance maximization of the UAV is taken as the objective function with aspect ratio and wing loading as design variables. Wing weight, stall speed, maximum speed and rate of climb are taken as constraints. In the dual objective case, minimizing weight is removed from the constraint set and added as the second objective and four more design variables namely taper ratio, thickness to chord ratio, loiter velocity and loiter altitude are added. In the single objective case, both conventional optimization algorithm and genetic algorithm are used to solve the problem and identical results are obtained. A newly developed multi-objective evolutionary algorithm named NSGA-II (non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm) is used to capture the full Pareto front for the dual objective problem. For the dual objective case, numerical results show that several useful Pareto optimal designs exist for the conceptual design of UAV. These Pareto points are thoroughly analyzed for use in detailed design.