Tri-Tilt-Rotor SAR VTOL Drone (Diploma Thesis)

1. System Division & Team Responsibilities

Our team split responsibilities cleanly: my teammate focuses on carbon composite chassis mechanics, propulsion sizing, power distribution and the 90° tilt mechanism. As team lead, I engineer all avionics, electronic redundancy, SORA safety compliance, ROS2 companion software, PID mixers, GCS ground control station and military partner contacts.

2. Vehicle Specifications & Operational Profile

The Tri-Tilt-Rotor SAR VTOL drone is engineered for extreme Alpine conditions where traditional multirotors lack range and fixed-wing aircraft cannot land:

• Mass & Airframe: 15 to 20 kg total takeoff mass with a 3.0-meter wingspan for efficient long-range gliding.
• Flight Speeds: Top speed of 130 km/h with an efficient cruise speed of 85 km/h.
• Operational Ceiling: Operational search altitude between 120m and 400m AGL, with a maximum travel altitude capability up to 4,000m MSL for mountain ridge crossings.

3. Thermal IR AI Person Detection & Jamming-Safe Navigation

Designed for harsh Alpine search & rescue operations, the drone carries a thermal IR camera streaming to an onboard AI vision pipeline executing on the Nvidia Jetson companion computer. When a missing person is recognized, real-time GPS coordinates are broadcast back to ground emergency rescue teams. To counter Electronic Warfare (EW) and GPS jamming in remote mountains, an optical flow camera algorithm maps terrain features to bound position drift within ±2m without satellite signal.

4. SORA Compliance & Military Partnership

Operating Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) in Austria requires strict adherence to AustroControl SORA safety guidelines. Our Technical Design Document (TDD) outlines a Pixhawk FMU flight control unit, fail-safe parachute recovery systems and encrypted telecommunications links. We are currently in active talks with the Austrian Armed Forces (Österreichisches Bundesheer) regarding specialized flight testing grounds and tactical sponsorship.