System identification of wind effects on multirotor aircraft

Abstract

Multirotor airplanes are widely used in many outdoor applications, e.g., agriculture, transportation, and public safety, where winds might be strong and prevalent. However, the effects of wind on multirotor aircraft are still not fully understood yet. The objective of this paper is to investigate and model wind effects on a real hovering octocopter. The wind is directly measured and considered as one of the inputs to the bare-airframe model. Then a series of models, each corresponding to a different wind condition, are identified from real flight data through a system identification approach. The time-domain validation results show that an average of 15% error reduction can be achieved by considering wind effects, captured by a wind correction term. The identified models will play an important role for the future development of model-based controllers for outdoor multirotor aircraft.