How much heavier must an observation UAV be if the wind is uncertain, and is designing to a wind quantile cheaper than a bigger battery reserve?

What it found

A stdlib extension of osrobot-uavwind draws one along-track wind per mission from a normal distribution (exact discretisation, no sampling noise) and sizes the airframe for a quantile of it. For a 3 km, 20 min, 0.5 kg mission with wind ~ N(8, 3) m/s, designing to the 95th-percentile wind (12.9 m/s) costs the fixed wing +3.7% mass (1.333 against 1.286 kg) and the multirotor +11.7% (2.518 against 2.254 kg). The standard 20% reserve, if it may be spent, already lifts a mean-wind design to 0.95 (fixed wing) and 0.99 (multirotor) success, and a larger reserve and a quantile design cost within a few percent of each other. At a 1 min stay the 95th-percentile design flips the lightest airframe from multirotor to fixed wing. Stylised: one steady wind per mission, assumed constants, no turbulence, no launch limit, and no flight.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.