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research article

Wind Estimation with Multirotor UAVs

Meier, Kilian
•
Hann, Richard
•
Skaloud, Jan  
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March 29, 2022
Atmosphere

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have benefited from a tremendous increase in popularity over the past decade, which has inspired their application toward many novel and unique use cases. One of them is the use of UAVs in meteorological research, in particular for wind measurement. Research in this field using quadcopter UAVs has shown promising results. However, most of the results in the literature suffer from three main drawbacks. First, experiments are performed as numerical simulations or in wind tunnels. Such results are limited in their validity in real-life conditions. Second, it is almost always assumed that the drone is stationary, which limits measurements spatially. Third, no attempts at estimating vertical wind are made. Overcoming these limitations offer an opportunity to gain significant value from using UAVs for meteorological measurements. We address these shortcomings by proposing a new dynamic model-based approach, that relies on the assumption that thrust can be measured or estimated, while drag can be related to air speed. Moreover, the proposed method is tested on empirical data gathered on a DJI Phantom 4 drone. During hovering, our method leads to precision and accuracy comparable to existing methods that use tilt to estimate the wind. At the same time, the method is able to estimate wind while the drone is moving. This paves the way for new uses of UAVs, such as the measurement of shear wind profiles, knowledge of which is relevant in Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) meteorology. Additionally, since a commercial off-the-shelf drone is used, the methodology can be replicated by others without any need for custom hardware development or modifications.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.3390/atmos13040551
Author(s)
Meier, Kilian
Hann, Richard
Skaloud, Jan  
Garreau, Arthur
Date Issued

2022-03-29

Published in
Atmosphere
Volume

13

Issue

4

Start page

1

End page

23, 551

Subjects

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)

•

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)

•

Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) meteorology

•

wind estimation

•

shear wind profile

•

UAV motion model

•

drag model

•

Blade Element Momentum (BEM) theory

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
TOPO  
Available on Infoscience
April 1, 2022
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/186813
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