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An Evidence Theoretic Approach to Design of Reliable Low-Cost UAVs

Small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAVs) are plagued by alarmingly high failure rates. Because these systems are small and built at lower cost than full-scale aircraft, high quality components and redundant systems are often eschewed to keep production costs low. This thesis proposes a process to ``design in'' reliability in a cost-effective way. Fault Tree Analysis is used to evaluate a system's (un)reliability and Dempster-Shafer Theory (Evidence Theory) is used to deal with imprecise failure data. Three unique sensitivity analyses highlight the most cost-effective improvement for the system by either spending money to research a component and reduce uncertainty, swap a component for a higher quality alternative, or add redundancy to an existing component. A MATLAB$^{\circledR}$ toolbox has been developed to assist in practical design applications. Finally, a case study illustrates the proposed methods by improving the reliability of a new SUAV design: Virginia Tech's SPAARO UAV. / Master of Science

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/33762
Date30 July 2009
CreatorsMurtha, Justin Fortna
ContributorsAerospace and Ocean Engineering, Woolsey, Craig A., Marchman, James F. III, Kochersberger, Kevin B.
PublisherVirginia Tech
Source SetsVirginia Tech Theses and Dissertation
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Formatapplication/pdf
RightsIn Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
RelationJustinMurthaThesisFinal.pdf

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