Performance Metrics of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles from the Perspective of ISR Applications

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have become a part of regular inventory for military and civilian applications. At present, UAVs are designed with design methodology of manned aircrafts with little fine tuning in configuration to integrate the payloads, datalink, etc. There is a need to identify important metrics for UAV to facilitate the UAV developers to realize an optimum configuration. Towards this, a system of categorizing and defining the metrics is proposed for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) UAVs. The metrics are categorized as performance metrics, design metrics and cross-cutting metrics based on the stakeholder categorization of Customer, Developer and Facilitator. The performance metrics for ISR UAV related to area coverage, range, time of flight and ceiling are compiled. A preliminary estimation of performance metrics for various types of ISR UAVs with Electro Optic payload is carried out to obtain insight about their ISR capability.