A wind estimation method for quadrotors using inertial measurement units

Wind estimation is quite important for the control and applications of quadrotors. On the basis of the freestream-velocity estimation method using inclination-angle measurement, this paper proposes a correction method considering the acceleration's influence on the quadrotor. Both the original and correction methods use the data that totally come from the inertial measurement units (IMUs) of the quadrotor. Kinetic model and controller of the quadrotor are illustrated. The original estimation method and the correction one are theoretically analyzed and verified through simulation. The result demonstrates that the correction method improves the wind estimation accuracy remarkably.

[1]  Ying-cheng Li,et al.  UAV Aerial Photography Technology in Island Topographic Mapping , 2011, 2011 International Symposium on Image and Data Fusion.

[2]  Roland Siegwart,et al.  Towards Estimation and Correction of Wind Effects on a Quadrotor UAV , 2014 .

[3]  Reece A. Clothier,et al.  An Evaluation of Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aircraft as Flying Wind Sensors , 2015 .

[4]  Matthias Bartholmai,et al.  Real-time wind estimation on a micro unmanned aerial vehicle using its inertial measurement unit , 2015 .

[5]  Claire J. Tomlin,et al.  Quadrotor Helicopter Flight Dynamics and Control: Theory and Experiment , 2007 .

[6]  Frank L. Lewis,et al.  Dynamic inversion with zero-dynamics stabilisation for quadrotor control , 2009 .

[7]  Nabil Aouf,et al.  Quadrotor control for trajectory tracking in presence of wind disturbances , 2014, 2014 UKACC International Conference on Control (CONTROL).

[8]  Anthony Tzes,et al.  Switching model predictive attitude control for a quadrotor helicopter subject to atmospheric disturbances , 2011 .

[9]  Sun Hai-zhu,et al.  Curve Fitting in Least-Square Method and Its Realization with Matlab , 2005 .

[10]  Yang Wang,et al.  Odor source localization using a mobile robot in outdoor airflow environments with a particle filter algorithm , 2011, Auton. Robots.

[11]  Joris De Schutter,et al.  Design and Control of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Autonomous Parcel Delivery with Transition from Vertical Take-off to Forward Flight – VertiKUL, a Quadcopter Tailsitter , 2015 .

[12]  Achim J. Lilienthal,et al.  Gas source localization with a micro-drone using bio-inspired and particle filter-based algorithms , 2013, Adv. Robotics.

[13]  Marco Lovera,et al.  Flatness-based control of a quadrotor helicopter via feedforward linearization , 2011, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference.

[14]  Steven Lake Waslander,et al.  Aerodynamics and control of autonomous quadrotor helicopters in aggressive maneuvering , 2009, 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[15]  Claire J. Tomlin,et al.  Precision flight control for a multi-vehicle quadrotor helicopter testbed , 2011 .