BV: Pre-Flight UAV Analysis

For our SUAS team, before finalizing our components selections, we calculate our current motor's performance and a rough estimate of our overall drone's performance for the competition.

To understand our current capabilities with the selected components, we conducted a performance study to estimate the drone's flight endurance and efficiency before any flight testing. We started by pulling our motor's characteristics from the manufacturer's published data and testing, which let us derive an equation for thrust as a function of current. From there, we varied speed to estimate how the drone's performance changed across different velocities, and we did the same for the mission's scanning region. Combining these two estimates gave us an overall predicted mission performance.