Experimental Characterization and Modeling of Maneuvering sUAV Flight Mechanics via Off-Board Measurements

The current study extends off-board motion capture techniques to characterize the longitudinal aerodynamics and stability of small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) during powered, maneu- vering flight. While prior work has applied motion tracking to glide and level flight, capturing control derivatives in dynamic conditions has remained limited due to challenges in measuring small control inputs. Targeted control surface doublet maneuvers were manually flown to excite the desired longitudinal dynamics, while vehicle motion, control surface deflection, and propeller RPM were tracked using off-board motion capture. The resulting aerodynamic forces and moments were measured, enabling the estimation of stability and control derivatives through a hybrid regression model. Simulation-based validation showed strong agreement between predicted and measured flight responses, with derivative trends consistent in sign with full-scale aircraft models, though reduced in magnitude as expected for small-scale low-Reynolds number flight.