Transition maneuver of a small Unmanned Air Vehicle using aerodynamic vectoring

Small Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) have gained significant attention from defense industry in recent years because of versatile applications in multi-faceted mission profiles. These vehicles have an enormous potential for near-area surveillance and close-field battle support. These can be used as a primary information gathering source in cluttered terrains. However, a unified design philosophy for a convertible platform to provide hovering flight modality coupled with the fast and agile forward flight modality at such scale is still lacking. The paper mainly discusses the transition maneuver between hover and forward flight. The effect of aerodynamic vectoring is delineated in terms of performance and trajectory analysis.