ABSTRACT
The mission capability needed from an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) drives all system-level requirements. The mission profile and system-level requirements are determined early in UAS development with input from customers to define how to best provide each capability. Military customers continue to drive UAS development, but the emergence of civilian demand for small UAS (sUAS) over the past decade has created a market pent-up by a worldwide regulatory environment that was unprepared to integrate any UAS, particularly sUAS, into the airspace system. UASs have been traditionally used for missions that are too “dirty, dangerous, or dull” for a human to be physically present in the aircraft. However, advances in communications and control systems have enabled increased autonomy of operations, thus enabling more specific mission-driven UAS designs. Key performance parameters that guide UAS requirements are derived from a description of the mission. Subsystem requirements are then derived from the UAS requirements.
