A low cost prototyping approach for design analysis and flight testing of the TURAC VTOL UAV

Over the last decade, the market share of civilian UAVs within the general UAV market has consistently increased. As such, these systems are increasingly being used for applications ranging from the monitoring of crops to the tracking of air emissions around high-pollution areas. Most of the civilian applications of UAVs require these vehicles to be of low-cost and for the portability and packaging to be easy while also having vertical take-off and landing capability. TURAC-a VTOL Tilt Rotor UAV with these capabilities-is designed. Although mathematical and CFD analyses were performed iteratively in order to optimize the design, testing in real life conditions were needed to see the real performance of the TURAC UAV. However, as with such an iterative design process, the manufacturing process costs, including different molds for each design, can be exorbitant. In addition, once an imperfection in the design is encountered, making radical design modifications on the UAV in real life is difficult and expensive. Therefore, a cheap, rapid, and easily reproducible prototyping methodology is essential. In this study, the end result of an iterative design process of TURAC is presented. In addition, a low-cost prototyping methodology is developed and its application is demonstrated in detail by explaining all of its phases. The ground and flight tests are applied on a fully functional prototype and the results are given.