Design of a Drone for Urban Application Using a Patented Technology
Luca Nanu, Angelo Lerro, Piero A. Gili · 2023
The present work deals with a design of a drone based on the ThrustPod technology, a patented solution for the vertical take-off and landing fixed wing aircraft in the urban aerial mobility scenario. The ThrustPod is based on extractable thrusters with fixed vertical axis that can be activated only for the vertical flight phases. On the contrary, in cruise conditions the ThrustPod thrusters are retracted inside the fuselage. The proposed solution leads to several advantages, e.g. reduced noise and reduced aerodynamic drag during cruise flight missions with respect to other equivalent aircraft. The proposed solution is designed for a drone to be used as a flying testbed to tune the ThrustPod functions and for aircraft control purposes in the entire flight envelope. The drone preliminary design is carried out using an in-house Matlab code and starting from some defined preliminary mission and aircraft specifications (e.g. wing span, cruise distance, etc.). The code is able to provide an optimal configuration of the drone, in terms of requirements for fuselage dimensions, energy and motors able to satisfy defined requirements with the minimum aircraft weight. The work is concluded with selection of suitable components able to satisfy the preliminary design requirements to manufacture the drone.