Weeding Out a Solution

This is a Scenario where a UAS is to be designed for precision crop-dusting but in the middle of the design process the system manufacturer found it to be overweight. The only way to reduce the weight is either by reducing the weight of the Guidance, Navigation & Control or reducing the weight of the payload delivery because the UAS will not be able to carry sufficient weight to spread the specified (Marketing has already talked this up to customers) amount of fertilizer over the specified area without cutting into the fuel margin. The safety engineers are uncomfortable with the idea of changing the fuel margin at all.So the company has decided to get your opinion as a systems engineer on what to do.

 In order to be able to solve this problem you have to know what is the true definition of systems engineering. Systems engineering is an interdisciplinary approach and means to enable the realization of successful systems by focuses on defining customer needs and documenting their requirement(INCOSE, n.d).

 With this definition it is clear to see where a systems engineer suggestion will be pointing to because for any product that is developed, the most important thing a system engineer puts into consideration is the customers requirement. Here the customers requirement is having a specific amount of fertilizer spread over a specified area. Therefore it makes sense for the systems engineer to work on reducing the weight of the Guidance, Navigation & Control System (GNC) instead of the payload and by so doing satisfies the requirement of the customer. 

Moreover the GNC is easier to change because they are parts that are installed after the development of the system as compared to the payload which sometimes has to be embedded into the unmanned aircraft system air frame.

Reference

INCOSE (n.d). What is Systems Engineering. Retrieved from 

http://www.incose.org/AboutSE/WhatIsSE

 

History of UAS

  Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) has evolved drastically from the inception in the early 1900 till today. It is amazing to see the amount of development that has occurred from when it was built strictly for the purpose of carrying bombs to intended target to now where it is used for almost anything we could think of. It is now been used for crop monitoring, search and rescue, fire spotting, mineral exploration, aerial photography, ground mapping to name a few (Darack, 2011).
  The era of UAS can be classified into four namely World War I, World War II, Post World War II, and Present day (Darack, 2011). Some of the UAS developed during this era will be discussed below.
  The first recognized UAS was the Kettering Aerial Torpedo also Known as the Kettering Bug. Built in 1918 during World War I, it was a small biplane powered by a De Palma 4-cylinder engine and guided by gyroscopes, a barometer and a mechanical computer and it had a range of 75 miles (Darack, 2011). This UAS was meant to be a flying bomb with a payload attached to it but was never used for war (Darack, 2011).
  The next era of the UAS was the World War II era, where the Germans created a UAS called the V1 buzz bomb which carried a payload of 1870 pounds and could travel a distance of  approximately 150 miles (Hickman, n.d). Its guidance system was gyroscopes, barometers and  anemometer ( Darack, 2011).
  The post World War II UAS development was lead by Reginald Denny's Radio plane company and most of the UAS designed and produced during this period were used for target practice (Darack, 2011). The development of UAS with still film started in this era even though the camera transmitted crude video (Darack 2011).
  The Modern day UAS started with the RQ-1 Predator which was designed by General Atomics for long reconnaissance work (Darack 2011). The RQ-1 has evolved and today its variants patrol the world and can unleash Hell fire air to ground missile and this aircraft can fly more than 32 hours at a stretch and stay as high as 65000 feet and is still able to send high resolution  imagery (Darak,2011)
  Presently there are a lot of companies that make UAS for uses other than military. Companies like Boeing, Denel dynamics, SAIC, Textron Inc are making drones for agriculture, search and rescue, fire spotting to name a few and there are a lot more companies still coming up (Harress, 2014)

Reference

Darack, E. (2011, May 17) A Brief History of Unmanned Aircraft 

http://www.airspacemag.com/photos/a-brief-history-of-unmanned-aircraft-174072843/

Harress, C. (2014, January 10) 12 Companies that will conquer the drone market in 2014 and 2015
 http://www.ibtimes.com/12-companies-will-conquer-drone-market-2014-2015-1534360

Hickman, K (n.d). World War II: V-1 Flying Bomb. Retrieved January 16, 2016 from

http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/artillerysiegeweapons/p/v1.htm

 (Links to an external site.)