A Practical Performance Evaluation Method for Electric Multicopters

Multicopters are attracting more and more attention these years. In the design stage, designers and users wonder if an assembled multicopter can meet their performance requirements, such as hovering endurance, system efficiency, maximum load, maximum pitch, and maximum flight distance. However, in practice, they used to evaluate the performance of a multicopter through lots of flight experiments or by experience, which are normally inefficient and costly. This motivates us to propose a comprehensive offline evaluation algorithm of multicopter performance. The performance indices considered are mainly determined by the propulsion system, including motors, propellers, electronic speed controllers, and batteries. Therefore, in the first stage of this research, models are established for the components of a propulsion system. In order to facilitate the application, only technical specifications of components offered by manufacturers are required as the input of the models. Based on the models and their relationships, equations describing performance indices are established and then solved to perform the evaluation. Finally, several examples are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed evaluation method. As a result, a website ( www.flyeval.com) is established, which can provide users with the performance evaluation mentioned in this paper.