Otomatik pilot kontrollü alçak irtifa balonlu keşif ve gözetleme aracı

Despite the fact that history of unmanned air vehicles (UAV's) are as old as history of conventional aircrafts, their recognition has been growing in recent years, especially after their civilian use became widespread. With evolution in all fields of technology, very advanced UAVs are in use now. However, limited flight time and payload capacities are still problem due to limited energy storage capacity. There is continuous force exerted on air vehicles, towards the earth because of gravity during the flight. Therefore, the air vehicles consumes most of its energy resources against to gravity in order to stay in air. Lighter-than-air (LTA) gases provide excellent solution to neutralize this force. LTA gases have lower density than the air therefore air applies buoyant force on LTA gases. Naturally, LTA gases have lifting capacity in the air. Hybrid airships are powered aircraft which obtains its lifts by using both lifting force from lighter-than-air (LTA) gases and aerodynamic lifting force generated by electro-mechanical components. Therefore they called as hybrid. A hybrid airship consist of mainly two parts. A blimp which carries the LTA gas and a propulsion system which generates thrust to allow airship to cruise and to make maneuvers. In this thesis, various methods are investigated to increase payload capacity and flight time of an UAV. As a solution, unmanned hybrid airship is developed by getting benefit from lifting force of LTA gases. As an LTA gas, Helium is used due to high lifting capacity and safety reason. In addition to blimp and propulsion system, a complete unmanned air system (UAS) is developed includes flight controller module, communication module and ground control module, in the scope of this thesis. It is observed that, developed unmanned airship has longer flight time and higher payload capacity with respect to comparable UAS's.