Mission Specific Quadrotor Reliability Analysis Framework

Achieving safe flight operation requires reliability to be an essential design factor apart from conventional ones such as range, endurance, and agility in multirotor unmanned aerial vehicle (MUAV) making. Existing literature considers reliability to a unique factor associated with a given MUAV. In this paper, however, we show that the reliability of a MUAV is not unique and is dependent on the type of mission, payload specifications, and placement of propulsion units. Towards demonstrating this, we use two quadrotor configurations with different propulsion units placements and assess their reliability through the Markov approach for critical and non-critical missions with heavy and light payloads. Further, we perform sensitivity analysis to identify the most sensitive component. Finally, an analysis is performed to obtain the relation between the increase in reliability, cost, and weight when a redundant component is introduced. As per the authors' knowledge, this is the first paper that shows that the reliability of a MUAV is not only dependent on its components but also on its mission and payload specifications.