New drone design can fly in dense air space without sacrificing range, battery life, or inspection coverage.
Engineers at the University of Surrey are advancing a fixed-wing drone platform designed for city deliveries and offshore wind inspection. The programme moves from motion-capture lab trials to controlled outdoor tests. The goal is fixed-wing range with precise manoeuvres in dense airspace.
Rotary wing drones like quadcopters hover precisely in limited space, but draw power fast and have limited range. Inversely, fixed-wing aircraft travel farther on less energy, yet struggle in tight spaces and gusty air. Engineers are therefore pursuing designs that combine fixed-wing endurance with accurate low-speed control.
Initial trials prioritise perching, short-run launch, tight turns, and glide recovery. Performance is tracked against parameters like energy per kilometre, crosswind tolerance, minimum turning radius, landing accuracy, and restart reliability. Target environments include routes between high-rise structures and turbine arrays. The platform is positioned for inspection, logistics, and emergency response.
Fixed-wing prototype drones use small wing-tail airframes with inertial sensors, barometric sensing, and control-surface encoders record flight states. A motion-capture rig validates ground-truth trajectories indoors.
Flight data train a machine-learning controller that predicts state changes and actuates elevator, aileron, rudder, and throttle in real time.
The approach reduces manually computing fluid dynamics for turbulent flow modelling. Each flight augments the dataset and updates the controller.
Indoor testing reports stable tracking and path replanning under induced gusts and obstacles. Real-world testing will expose the system to wind shear, wakes from buildings and turbines, and moving obstacles.
