An Evidence Theoretic Approach to Design of Reliable Low-Cost UAVs

Abstract

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) are plagued by alarmingly high failure rates. Because these systems are small and built at lower cost than full-scale aircraft, high quality components and redundant systems are often eschewed to keep production costs low. This thesis proposes a process to "design in" reliability in a cost-effective way. Fault Tree Analysis is used to evaluate a system's (un)reliability and Dempster-Shafer Theory (Evidence Theory) is used to deal with imprecise failure data. Three unique sensitivity analyses highlight the most cost-effective improvement for the system by either spending money to research a component and reduce uncertainty, swap a component for a higher quality alternative, or add redundancy to an existing component. A MATLAB (registered trademark) toolbox has been developed to assist in practical design applications. Finally, a case study illustrates the proposed methods by improving the reliability of a new SUAV design: Virginia Tech's SPAARO UAV.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jul 28, 2009
Accession Number
ADA522686

Entities

People

  • Justin F. Murtha

Organizations

  • Virginia Tech

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy
  • Ground and Sea Platforms
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Airframes
  • Bending Moments
  • Case Studies
  • Complex Systems
  • Control Surfaces
  • Control Systems
  • Engineering
  • Engineers
  • Failure Mode And Effect Analysis
  • Fault Tree Analysis
  • Gaussian Distributions
  • Modulus Of Elasticity
  • Monte Carlo Method
  • Reliability
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Fields of Study

  • Engineering

Readers

  • Aerial Unmanned Vehicle Swarm Micro Periodontal Dentistry.
  • Economics
  • Inertial Navigation Systems.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy