Case Study: Parrot achieves months-to-days propeller development and automated drone blade optimization with CAESES

Drone Propeller Design and Shape Optimization at Parrot

Parrot, a leading French drone manufacturer, faced long, manual propeller design cycles and needed a way to speed up development while enabling innovative blade concepts. To address repetitive tasks like importing airfoil data, fitting parametric models, creating clean 3D surfaces and managing meshing and CFD prep, Parrot adopted the CAESES customized design framework (CAESES) to automate and parameterize their propeller workflow.

CAESES implemented a flexible, scriptable framework that automates airfoil import, parametric shape control, 3D blade creation, meshing and integration with CFD tools (including an ACT app for ANSYS Workbench). The result: development time dropped from months to days, engineers can generate hundreds of blade geometries in minutes, and automated high‑fidelity parametric studies and optimizations are now possible through CAESES-integrated workflows.

Parrot

David Gomez Ariza

Aerodynamics and Propulsion Expert