Swarm-ready fixed wing airframes: Subscale flight modes and control surface reduction simplification

New technological advances allow fixed-wing drones to become more viable for differing missions, most realized in "swarming" where multiple aircraft, or "agents", fly with shared objectives. Two practical problems facing aerial swarm testing are achieving initial flight conditions across many agents and lowering per unit cost. Previous swarming attempts using traditional runway takeoff methods are limited by the airframes’ endurance and human control, where traditional runway takeoff and manual initial condition establishment across many agents results in cases where the early agents encounter endurance limits as later agents are developed. Similarly, lowering per-unit cost is critical to the number agents and their capabilities within a swarm, often achieved through simplification, including reduction of the number of actuated control surfaces, and through minimum scale vehicles. This work approached the initial condition establishment through a pneumatic launch system, which maximizes launch numbers by launching airframes at minimum airspeed, generating considerations about the minimalist required surfaces for minimum controllability. Minimum scale vehicles have differing flight modes, with two definitions of scaling providing bounding assumptions on mass redistribution. Linearized state-space form models dynamic modes of behavior to create closed form analytic expressions as a function of geometric scale. This paper focuses on the controllability/behavior of swarm capable airframes with simplified manufacturing through omission of control surfaces and circumvention of typical development cycles with geometrically scaling airframes to fulfill mission parameters.