Product
MADETOOL
MATLAB Aerospace Design Engineering Tool. Conceptual and preliminary design of fixed-wing UAVs in DoD Groups 1-3, including VTOL aircraft that transition to wing-borne flight - operated here with GNU Octave 8.4.
Who it is for
Engineers who need a defensible first answer.
UAV design teams
Turn a customer requirement set into a sized concept, see which requirements pass, and find out which assumptions drive the result.
Students and researchers
Work with a structured requirements format, traceable methods and a report that lists its own sources and validation needs.
Workflow
What happens when you click Design
Inside the solver, main.m runs a fixed sequence of stages. It stops early when the input is invalid or the configuration is unsupported; later stages always run so the report can show what is missing.
Features
Built around a requirements file you can read.
Structured requirements (PRD)
- Every requirement carries its relation (>=, <=, =), unit, reference (TAS/EAS/CAS/IAS, AGL/MSL), type, priority and source.
- Unknown values are written as TBD and are never treated as zero.
- Placeholders are flagged in validation and in the report.
Integrated sizing
- Constraint diagram, design-point rule and a fixed-point MTOW loop.
- Mission cases for endurance and range with additive reserves.
- Optional one-parameter trade study.
Honest capability checks
- Each module declares the propulsion codes, VTOL codes, layouts, tails and fidelity levels it supports.
- Unsupported configurations are rejected - never silently substituted.
Verification and traceability
- Compliance matrix with margins and statuses, DoD UAS group check.
- Engineering checks of every module, methods and sources with verification levels.
Real output files
What a completed run gives you
These are MADETOOL’s own outputs, written by mt_report. Files are named after the aircraft and the run time.
Limitations
Know what this build does not do.
Solver build 1.0.0, PRD format 1.7.
- Analysis runs end-to-end for battery-electric, piston, series-hybrid, parallel-hybrid and turboprop aircraft, with runway/hand/launcher take-off or lift+cruise VTOL, in a conventional layout.
- Tilt-rotor, tilt-wing and tailsitter VTOL, jet propulsion, flying wings, canards and tandem wings are rejected by the capability check.
- Five of the ten supported combinations have an example that closes; the other five are exercised by MADETOOL’s tests for two sizing passes only.
- Pure multirotors are out of scope.
- Example component, aerodynamic and layout data are placeholders or synthetic; results built on them are illustrations.
- Release 1.0.0 draws no plots; the constraint diagram is delivered as a table and CSV.
- Release 1.0.0 was tested with GNU Octave 8.4; the MATLAB R2026a+ run is still open in the MADETOOL project.
Engineering disclaimer. MADETOOL produces conceptual/preliminary design estimates. Results are not validated, certified, or flight-ready and do not replace detailed engineering analysis, testing, or certification. Read the full disclaimer.