Propeller Design and Optimization for Aerial, Aquatic, and Hybrid Small Unmanned Vehicles - A Systematic Mapping Study

In recent years, small unmanned vehicles have emerged as vital tools across various industries, driving innovation in fields ranging from environmental monitoring to logistics and defense. The propeller is a crucial component for these vehicles, requiring careful design and optimization. The operating requirements regarding, for instance, performance, energy consumption, noise, and other metrics heavily depend on the application domains and tasks. Also, the different vehicle morphologies and characteristics make the propeller design challenging. This work presents a systematic mapping study that identifies and classifies recent research on design and optimization methods for conventional propellers used in small aerial, aquatic, and hybrid multirotor unmanned vehicles. The study analyzed 30 peer-reviewed articles published between 2020 and May 2025, retrieved from four major databases: IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Scopus,and Web of Science. Articles were categorized according to vehicle type, propeller geometry, evaluation methods, optimization strategies, and performance metrics. The analysis shows that Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is the most commonly used evaluation approach and optimization methods — particularly advanced strategies like evolutionary algorithms—remain underexplored, appearing in only 43.3% of the studies. Although some articles focus solely on the analysis of pre-existing propeller models, others explore novel designs under varying operating conditions. This mapping highlights gaps in the adoption of optimization tools, the underrepresentation of aquatic and hybrid vehicles, and the limited integration between simulation and experimental validation. These findings aim to support future research by identifying methodological trends and underserved research directions in propeller design for small unmanned systems.