The rise of online retailers has led to a burgeoning demand for rapid package delivery. Amazon, Google, and other companies are leveraging technological advances to pursue the use of small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) for delivery of small and lightweight packages. sUAS delivery is appealing to these retailers because of the potential for eliminating the reliance on traditional delivery services and for creating a more efficient, flexible, rapid, and vertically-integrated order-to-delivery process. This paper examines the use of sUAS for on-demand package delivery by evaluating potential concepts of operations. A modeling capability is presented that allows for analysis of the economic, regulatory, and logistical aspects of sUAS delivery systems. A case study of on-demand package delivery in the San Francisco area is presented, including a comparison of sUAS delivery with traditional truck delivery. Metrics including cost per package and average package delivery time are simulated to compare different delivery scenarios.

A vital requirement of the modern combat environment is to gain and maintain situational awareness to facilitate effective squad-level decision making. This paper presents a part of the research undertaken by Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in collaboration with the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in developing design capabilities for small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS). As part of this effort the team developed a toolset capable of creating mission-specific fixed wing aircraft assets that can be rapidly tailored and manufactured at a forward operating base. The toolset includes a physics-based analysis model to generate feasible aircraft designs from a family of designs, a decision making tool to select the optimal design for a mission, and a parametric CAD model. The CAD model accepts sizing parameters from the design algorithm and uses them to scale baseline part files, which can then be used to rapidly manufacture vehicle parts. Several sets of mission requirements were chosen, leading to unique fixed wing aircraft designs which were manufactured and flown. The process described herein can be used to develop and fabricate small unmanned airplane designs to fulfill rapidly changing squad-level mission-specific operational needs, but can also be applied to other vehicle architectures.

Recent advances in small unmanned aircraft systems (SUAS) have greatly broadened the scope of their potential applications. However, traditional design processes applied to SUAS produce a single design for a single set of requirements. Off-design mission performance is often greatly degraded due to the vehicle’s small scale. This paper considers a different approach to SUAS design aimed at addressing this issue. In this approach, a hybrid modular and scalable product family is coupled with linked engineering analyses in order to automatically formulate a design given a set of mission requirements. This allows multiple SUAS designs to be rapidly synthesized from multiple sets of design requirements using a common set of components. Designs are then rapidly generated and manufactured “on-demand” using automated manufacturing techniques in order to address unforeseen mission needs. The design approach, named “Aggregate Derivative Approach to Product Design” (ADAPt Design), consists of four actions: (1) requirements analysis, (2) architecture selection, (3) interface design, and (4) concept refinement and design. The outcomes of the method are a family of designs which are highly compatible with design automation, and a toolset that automatically translates changes in requirements to changes in detailed 3-D models. Results of the application of this approach are presented via the design of several SUAS. The capability of the design paradigm is assessed through a comparison of design requirements to the measured performance of the designed vehicle, and conclusions are drawn about the approach’s applicability and scalability.