The formation of technical appearance of a helicopter-type unmanned aerial vehicle in part of take-off and landing devices that provide take-off and landing on the ship’s helicopter landing pad

Due to the growing requirements to the fleet in terms of increasing the efficiency of solving assigned tasks, taking into account the ever-increasing operational situation, increased use of unmanned aerial vehicles is required, including small and medium-displacement ships. Thus, an important trend in the development of helicopter-type unmanned aerial vehicles (HT UAVs) is their adaptation to ship-based conditions. The key problem of adaptation is ensuring the take-off and landing on the ship’s landing pad (runway). This article discusses the influence of ship-based conditions, the most important of which is ship’s pitching, and requirements for performing takeoff and landing operations, including the need to adapt to forced landing systems, on the formation of the design of the landing gear of a HT UAV, and formulates the design specifications typical to the landing gear of a shore-based aircraft. At the same time, to study the dynamic and static compatibility of the HT UAV with the ship, deterministic or probabilistic characteristics of the ship’s pitching should be set in the form of pitching amplitudes and periods, pitching spectral densities, variances of displacements and velocities of the runway center, as well as displacements, velocities and accelerations in the runway center. Based on the specified parameters, the kinematics of the movement of the center of the runway and its spatially complex positions are calculated to solve the problem of dynamic compatibility of the VTOL UAV with the ship. Dynamic compatibility includes determining the stability and controllability of the HT UAV, unwinding and stopping the main rotor, take-off and landing, and transporting the HT UAV along the runway. The existing and prospective basic design schemes of the skid landing gear are divided into four main types and evaluated for compliance with the specifics of operation on the ship, special attention is paid to the possibility of adaptation to forced landing systems on deck. Based on the evaluation results, a design scheme of the landing gear for a promising HT parallelogram-lever type UAV with an external shock absorber is proposed. As a confirmation of the compliance of the proposed scheme with the formulated requirements, the results of the calculation of the dynamic landing gear model during landing and rolling, performed in the Simcenter Motion software package, are presented. The proposed scheme can be implemented for both HT UAVs and manned ship-based and shore-based helicopters. 

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