An Innovative Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance Unmanned Aircraft System with Advanced Flight Management and Navigation Features

This paper presents preliminary activities in the framework of the research and development project entitled "Geared unmanned Aircraft with Novel Navigation unit and Engine on Tail - GANNET". It is a project funded by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development that involves two Italian aerospace companies such as Dallair and Wind Aeronautics. They are supported by University of Naples for the research activities. This project aims at developing an innovative Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance remotely piloted aircraft. The most important issue related to this project is the reduction of overall system costs both in terms of production, operation, and maintenance. Therefore, an approach similar to the one adopted for the development of manned ultralight aircraft has been adopted. In particular, two terms have been addressed, such as airframe and on-board system development. The first one was realized with a large use of advanced composite materials. Regarding onboard systems, an original Inertial Measurement Unit have been developed to provide accurate and high-integrity navigation measurement. This option is very important when strapdown payloads are adopted, such as Synthetic Aperture Radars. The resulting system is suitable for frequent surveillance missions over large areas, such as sea monitoring. The paper describes all the system development process including requirements, airframe development, and autopilot selection.