Trim and Maneuverability Analysis Using a New Constrained PSO Approach of a UAV

Performance characteristic of an unmanned air vehicle (uav) is investigated using a newly developed heuristic approach. almost all flight phases of any air vehicle can be categorized into trim and maneuvering flights. in this paper, a new envelope called trim-ability envelope, is introduced and sketched within the conventional flight envelope for a small uav. optimal maneuverability of the intended uav is evaluated for minimum time pull-up and turn maneuvers. for both the trim and the maneuver problems, the nonlinear 6dof dynamic models as well as the vehicle constraints are considered. a heuristic based constrained optimization approach is developed to solve both the trim and maneuver problems. several interesting performance characteristics are extracted. the results are indicative of a good potential for the proposed algorithm to handle complex constrained optimization problems in aerospace engineering