A novel online model-based wind estimation approach for quadrotor micro air vehicles using low cost MEMS IMUs

This work extends the drag-force enhanced quadrotor model by denoting the free stream air velocity as the difference between the ground speed and the wind speed. It is demonstrated that a relatively simple nonlinear observer is capable of estimating the local wind components, provided accelerometer and GPS-velocity measurements are available. We perform a wind tunnel experiment at various wind speeds using a quadrotor vehicle with a low-cost Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a motion tracking system to provide accurate ground speed measurements. It is shown that the onboard Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) accurately estimates the wind components.