Abstract
Wind velocity (strength and direction) is an important parameter for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based environmental monitoring tasks. A novel wind velocity estimation method is proposed for rotorcrafts. Based on an extended state observer, this method derives the wind disturbance from rotors’ speeds and rotorcraft’s acceleration and position. Then the wind disturbance is scaled to calculate the airspeed vector, which is substituted into a wind triangle to obtain the wind velocity. Easy-to-implement methods for calculating the rotorcraft’s thrust and drag coefficient are also proposed, which are important parameters to obtain the wind drag and the airspeed, respectively. Simulations and experiments using a quadrotor in both hovering and flight conditions have validated the proposed method.
Highlights
With advantages of hovering capability and high maneuverability, unmanned rotorcrafts (URs) have become popular in a diverse range of environmental monitoring applications, such as atmospheric measurement [1] and air pollution tracing [2,3]
The wind profile plays a significant role, because UR flight performance is vulnerable to unpredictable wind conditions, and because it is a kind of important information
This paper has written a simulation environment based on the robot active olfaction system (RAOS) [33] and designed several scenarios to compare the inclination-angle-measurement method proposed in [19] and this method
Summary
With advantages of hovering capability and high maneuverability, unmanned rotorcrafts (URs) have become popular in a diverse range of environmental monitoring applications, such as atmospheric measurement [1] and air pollution tracing [2,3]. Wind information is usually required in typical gas-tracing approaches such as anemotaxis algorithms [4,5], fluid-engineering-based methods [6,7] and statistical methods [8,9,10]. It is valuable for engineering practice that URs be designed with the ability to measure wind strength/direction. Mounting wind sensors, such as anemometers [11] and pitot probes [12], on URs may be a straightforward way to solve the problem, anemometers and other auxiliary sensors are typically bulky and heavy in contrast to the valuable payload of the UR. Because the turbulence induced by the rotors would strongly deteriorate the sensor outputs, this direct methodology cannot yield reliable results on URs
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