Wind gust alerting for supervisory control of a Micro Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

In this paper we present a method for estimating wind gusts and a corresponding display for increasing the situational awareness of a minimally trained operator controlling a Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV). Our method utilizes statistical correlations between MAV controller output and prior wind conditions to predict the presence of a gust in the current flight environment. The findings show that the effect of wind gusts on the MAV are significantly correlated to the rate of increase and duration of a gust rather than the magnitude of the gust. The primary benefit of this method is the simplicity of identifying wind gusts without additional sensors and without performing additional maneuvers. This technique enables existing vehicles to incorporate wind conditions into their operator displays without vehicle modification and without dedicating computation resources to flight modeling. In contrast to traditional wind indicators, our display presents wind information in the form of a warning metric rather than a wind velocity vector.