Unmanned aircraft systems are becoming more and more complex in order to fulfill a number of potentially conflicting performance and robustness requirements. However, the use traditional development methods that continue to rely on legacy designs and domain specific tools that perform subsystem-level optimization make it difficult, if not impossible to perform system-level design optimization of these complex systems.
Engineers are adopting model-based design as a way to address these issues and develop and optimize designs at the system level using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) tools. With model-based design, engineers create multi-domain models in a shared environment so that subsystems from different disciplines, such as guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) and communication, can be integrated into a common system-level model early in the process. With a system-level model, engineers can explore the design space to conduct design tradeoff studies and then refine requirements and develop requirements-based tests.
Joy Lin, Aerospace and Defence Industry Marketing Manager at MathWorks posted this article in Avionics Intelligence arguing the case for model-based design using COTS tools for unmanned aerial systems development.
Summary
To meet the system-level requirements for the next generation of unmanned aerial systems, engineers can no longer rely on the traditional approach in which optimization is performed at the subsystem level and then subsystems are integrated into an overall system. Engineers need tools that enable them to perform system-level tradeoffs and observe the effects of design changes that may span multiple subsystems and multiple disciplines to avoid system integration issues and to ensure overall system performance meets requirements. model-based design with MATLAB and Simulink enables engineers from different disciplines to optimize their designs at the system level, verify high level requirements, and perform design tradeoffs before implementing the design in software or developing a hardware prototype.
Source: Avionics Intelligence