Unmanned Systems Technology 021 | Robot Aviation FX450 l Imaging Sensors focus l UAVs Insight l Liquid-Piston X-Mini l Riptide l Eurosatory 2018 show report l Zipline l Electric Motors focus l ASTS show report

24 Dossier | Robot Aviation FX450 of Martin Jetpack, and Nyroth has spent 25 years building and operating his own commercial UAVs. A team of electrical, electronic, computing and flight test engineers was then brought in to take on the systems integration task. These preparations also included a move to Eggemoen Aviation and Technology Park at Hønefoss Airport, north-west of Oslo and about an hour from Gardermoen International Airport. The company also opened a second facility in Poland, near Warsaw, where the aerodynamic, structural and mechanical design and manufacturing are carried out before the vehicles are shipped to Eggemoen for systems integration and final tests and checks. It then decided to shelve several unmanned helicopter projects, for which prototypes had been built, in favour of concentrating on bringing the fixed-wing projects to market, with development of the FX450 as the main thrust. Three prototypes had already been flown, and now the focus is on integration of the fourth, production- representative, aircraft. Configuration and aerodynamics The airframe is of tailless canard configuration with a pusher propeller, and its fuselage starts narrow at the nose and continues that way until the wing root before widening out, creating the strong impression of having been modelled on a goose in flight. Perhaps even more distinctive are the large winglets that are the only vertical aerodynamic surfaces and which contain the two rudders. The other control surfaces consist of a single flaperon on each wing and split elevators, with two on each canard. The goose-like fuselage design and (to stick with the waterfowl theme) the canard configuration are the design work of Ole Vidar Homleid and Pawel Rozanski. Homleid is one of the company’s founders, who came into unmanned aviation via the world of large, high- performance scale-model gliders and full-scale (or manned) glider flying, so aerodynamic efficiency and a facility with composite materials are second nature to him. He chose the canard configuration for its resistance to stalling in normal operations and the fact that the foreplane is also a lifting surface that improves aerodynamic efficiency. Conventional aircraft that are designed to be aerodynamically stable position the centre of gravity (CoG) ahead of the centre of lift, and counteract the forward pitching moment this causes by using the tail surfaces to generate negative lift. The downside with that though is the aircraft as a whole must generate extra positive lift to offset this, which means more induced drag. In a canard configuration, the August/September 2018 | Unmanned Systems Technology Robot Aviation continues to invest in CAD packages for structural design at its Polish plant (Courtesy of Robot Aviation) The FX450’s shape, reminiscent of a goose in flight, was created by Ole Vidar Homleid, one of the company’s founders, and Pawel Rozanski (Courtesy of Robot Aviation)