This paper describes the design and development of a hybrid fuel cell/battery propulsion system for a long endurance small UAV. The high level system architecture is presented, followed by the hardware-in-the-loop testing and performance analysis. A high fidelity 6-DoF simulation model of the complete system was developed and used to test the system under different battery state-of-charge. The simulation model included the power manager for the hybrid propulsion system configuration, which is based on rule-based control. The simulation results are compared with the experimental results obtained from the Hardware-in-the-Loop testing.

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In large civil aircraft manufacturing, a time-consuming post-production process is the non-destructive inspection of wing panels. This work aims to address this challenge and improve the defects’ detection by performing automated aerial inspection using a small off-the-shelf multirotor. The UAV is equipped with a wide field-of-view camera and an ultraviolet torch for implementing non-invasive imaging inspection. In particular, the UAV is programmed to perform the complete mission and stream video, in real-time, to the ground control station where the defects’ detection algorithm is executed. The proposed platform was mathematically modelled in MATLAB/SIMULINK in order to assess the behaviour of the system using a path following method during the aircraft wing inspection. In addition, two defect detection algorithms were implemented and tested on a dataset containing images obtained during inspection at Airbus facilities. The results show that for the current dataset the proposed methods can identify all the images containing defects.

In large civil aircraft manufacturing a timeconsuming post-production process is the non-destructive inspection of wing panels. This work aims to address this challenge and improve the defects' detection by performing automated aerial inspection using a small off-the-shelf multirotor. The UAV is equipped with a wide field-of-view camera and an ultraviolet torch for implementing non-invasive imaging inspection. In particular, the UAV is programmed to perform the complete mission and stream video, in real-time, to the ground control station where the defects' detection algorithm is executed. The proposed platform was mathematically modelled in MATLAB/SIMULINK in order to assess the behaviour of the system using a path following method during the aircraft wing inspection. The UAV was tested in the lab where a six-meter-long wing panel was oneside inspected. Initial results indicate that this inspection method could reduce significantly the inspection time, cost, and workload, whilst potentially increasing the probability of detection.