What is a UAV launch wind limit worth in money, and should the launch threshold sit below the design limit when the forecast is wrong?
research/osrobot-uavvalue
What is a UAV launch wind limit worth in money, and should the launch threshold sit below the design limit when the forecast is wrong? With an assumed expensive airframe and a 2 m/s forecast error the best threshold sits 1 to 6 m/s below the design limit, worth up to $284 per attempt, with failures at or below 0.1%; with a cheap airframe the best design covers nearly every wind. Stylised, assumed prices.
What it found
A stdlib extension of osrobot-uavnogo puts a money value on a completed observation, the loss of an aircraft on a failure and a scrubbed day, then searches the design wind limit L and the launch threshold T together (exact probabilities, no sampling noise). With a cheap airframe ($1,500/kg, assumed) the best design is for nearly every wind (L at 14 m/s or more in 17 of 18 cases, 11 on the grid edge) and the rule barely matters. With an expensive one ($30,000/kg, assumed) the optimum is interior, and with a 2 m/s forecast error the best T sits 1 to 6 m/s below L in all 9 cases, worth up to $284 per attempt over tying T to L, with failures at or below 0.1%. Money figures are assumptions, many optima sit on the grid edge, and a failure is assumed to lose the whole airframe. Stylised, no aircraft designed or flown.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
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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.