Practical Considerations for a VTOL Free-Wing UAS

A VTOL free-wing configuration poses many interesting design choices related to hardware, navigation, and control. Avionics hardware, including the IMU, magnetometer, GPS, and air speed sensors, can be placed in either the fuselage or wing bodies, with implementation changes needed to accommodate these decisions in a navigation system. Meanwhile, the stability augmentation system, tail, and landing gear design will impact the handling qualities for manual flight and autopilot take-off performance. This paper details practical design recommendations with discussion as applied to a test bed aircraft to enable transition flight testing to wing-borne flight and back to hover. Flight test and simulation results are included to help motivate these design considerations and validate their implementation for future flight testing through transition.