UAV design book

Our new book on the design of small fixed wing unmanned aircraft is out  (see this post).

It is accompanied by a couple of software tools, which the reader may choose to include in their own design processes (under the conditions of the GNU General Public License).

First, it contains two Jupyter notebooks to be used for constraint analysis in the first stage of the concept design process, one written in Python 2, another in Python 3. The notebooks are self-contained, save for one package: Kevin Horton’s Aero-Calc. This needs to be installed first before the notebooks can be run (a version translated into Python 3 can be found here). pip can be used to install the Python 2 version of the package (type pip install aerocalc in a terminal window); the Python 3 version can simply be copied to a folder where your Python installation looks for packages.

Second, the reader may wish to make use of some AirCONICS-based parametric geometry scripts, which will build conceptual/preliminary design models of a family of aircraft based one of the designs (Decode 1) described in the book. More details, and the code (appendix.py and its dependencies), can be found here.

Finally, here are a few errors we spotted after the book went to print: errata

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