Hi
It just saddens me the most to see a decent thread going down the drain thanks to trolling. Yes indeed Tejas indeed can be converted into an un-manned aircraft much more easily than developing lets say a fully stealth UCAV. Reasons for that are simple-
1) It would require lesser amount of tweaking in flight control laws to convert tejas from manned aircraft to UAV. In the manned version, pilot decides what angle of attack he wants to trim his aircraft at and the flight control computer adjusts the levcons in real time to make that happen. In flight control parlance it is known as the inner most loop.
2) The major challenges are: the UCAV version will be restricted to certain roles only. For instance features like auto take off and landing can be easily encorporated into the UCAV version. One can use UCAV tejas for limited roles like-
(a) Attacking enemy aircrafts using BVR missiles
(b) Trajectory tracking and dropping bombs at designated way points.
(c) SAR and EW role.
Where it can not be used or very difficult to implement:
(a) Typical dogfight etc
Now the reason why I firmly believe it can be done in matter of 5 years is simply because-
The fundamental control laws are known to ADA and just by adding couple of layers/loops one can easily add functionalities like trajectory tracking/ way points etc. Tejas uses an MRAC control scheme with 4 redundant channels. In UCAV application, the degree of redundancy can be lowered to make space for fuel and ordnance etc. If things were upto me, I would implement an adaptive fuzzy sliding mode control or sliding mode control for inner most loop and look ahead based guidance scheme for outer loop. The control strategy should be such that it can switch between modes in flight- for instance-
(A) To tackle an enemy aircraft- UCAV would need something like LOS based PN guidance scheme, whereas
(B) In order to sneak past enemy radars and destroy particular locations, it would need look ahead guidance.
@Taygibay Also I hope you got my paper?
