Preliminary Design of a Highly Efficient VTOL System Based on Tethered Fixed-Wing Aircraft
Bibliographic record
Abstract
2016, to form their 34th Student Design Competition around designing an aircraft capable of hovering for a duration of 24 hours with a 176 lb (80 kg) payload. This paper presents the preliminary design of the Swarm, a configuration of the Electric Powered Reconfigurable Rotor (EPR2 ) concept, drafted by the joint Universite de Sherbrooke and Georgia Tech team. The Swarm, comprised of a central fuselage tethered to three electrically propelled unmanned fixed-wing aircraft flying in a circular trajectory, achieves its goal through rotor reconfiguration. Throughout the flight, the fixed-wing aircraft modify their trajectory and airspeed to optimize performance and minimize fuel burn rate. A hybrid-electric powerplant in the fuselage supplies power via conductive tethers to the fixed-wing aircraft. The design and reconfiguration were optimized using a 2-step time-marching optimization. The designed system greatly exceeds the competition requirements by accomplishing 31 hours of hover flight using readily available technologies and COTS components. The Swarm, weighing a maximum of 2,700 lb (1,224 kg), requires only between 62 and 120 hp (46-89 kW) to perform hover out of ground effect. Safety, reliability and maintenance analyses were also conducted, in addition to estimating production and operational costs of the system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".