Surface Wind Profile Measurement Using Multiple Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Document Type

Conference Paper

Journal/Book Title/Conference

2010 American Control Conference (ACC)

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Location

Baltimore, MD

Publication Date

7-2010

Abstract

This paper focuses on using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for measurement and estimation of the mesoscale or microscale wind field. Low-level wind and near-surface wind could have many applications such as wind power harvesting, weather prediction, pollution dispersion, and safer aircraft landing/take-off, etc. However, current wind profiling techniques like balloons and meteorological towers are not only expensive but also inflexible. UAVs could be used to measure the wind strength and directions at a flexible position and altitude in real time. Moreover, groups of UAVs with a certain formation could measure the vertical or horizon wind profiling simultaneously. Given the measurements of an area, the wind field could be approximately modeled by a series of partial differential equations (PDEs). An incremental parameter estimation algorithm using single and multiple UAVs is developed. Preliminary simulation and experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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