2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Singapore, May 29 - June 3, 2017

Model-based Wind Estimation for a Hovering VTOL Tailsitter

UAV
Y. Demitri† , S. Verling, T. Stastny, A. Melzer and R. Siegwart

Abstract— To many unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)

designs, the lack of information about the wind speed
and direction is a limiting factor in achieving robust
outdoor flight. This paper addresses the problem of
wind estimation onboard a hovering vertical take-off
and landing (VTOL) tailsitter UAV. The proposed
estimation framework makes use of the standard on-
board sensor suite: inertial measurement unit (IMU),
global positioning system (GPS) and a magnetometer.
No additional airspeed sensor is needed. As a result,
the autopilot is provided with an estimate of the wind
velocity vector in the horizontal (north-east) plane.
An aerodynamic model of the vehicle has been derived
and used in a Kalman filter framework to estimate the
horizontal wind velocity vector in real-time.
The wind estimator has been implemented onboard
the UAVs autopilot and validated in real flight. As a
result, we successfully obtain the direction and speed
of the wind with an estimation accuracy close to the
accuracy range of the ground truth measurement.
Furthermore, the derived grey-box model allows to
generalise the framework to different airframes.
I. Introduction
The last decade has seen a substantial boom in un-
manned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology, demonstrat-
ing their immense capabilities. So far, UAVs have had
a successful transfer from research laboratories to the
consumer market. Among the promising UAV designs are
hybrid systems, which combine the agility and maneu-
verability of multi-copters with the efficiency and range
of fixed-wing systems. This matches the requirements of
various commercial applications, which include covering
wide areas, as well as taking off and landing vertically
in confined spaces. Therefore, hybrid UAVs can have
remarkable impact on industries such as agriculture,
mining or parcel delivery in the near future.
The Wingtra One [1] in Fig. 1 is a tailsitter UAV. It is
a mechanically simple form of hybrid UAV, with vertical
take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities and the ability
to transition into efficient forward flight by performing a
90◦ tilt maneuver in the air.
One major drawback of the tailsitter design is its
high susceptibility to wind disturbances, when in hover
flight. Due to the wide surface area of the vertically
hovering wing, the vehicle experiences substantial drag
forces from winds acting in a direction normal to the wing
area. This drastically limits the UAV’s capabilities in
*This work was heavily supported by Wingtra AG.
† All authors are with the Autonomous Systems Lab from ETH
Zurich. - email: demitriy@ethz.ch
Fig. 1: Wingtra One - tailsitter UAV
landing vertically while maintaining level attitude. While
wind disturbances are generally an integral challenge
for any autonomous UAV control, most efforts tackling
this challenge have been focused on developing more
robust control algorithms. Thereby, the idea is to blindly
minimize the control error, without explicit information
about the incident wind. The most common multi-copter
UAV designs, e.g. quadcopters, are relatively symmetri-
cal across their horizontal body axes. Therefore, explicit
information about the wind velocity does not add much
value improving controllability.
In this light, a tailsitter UAV - like the platform used in
this work (Fig. 2) - has the special property of a highly
asymmetric design, when comparing the dimensions of
its x- and y-axes. Hence, the effect of wind attacking
perpendicular to the wing area is substantially different
from winds blowing parallel along the wing area. For
this reason, providing the autopilot with a real-time
estimate of the wind vector is crucial for improving flight
performance in high winds and can be the determining
factor in guaranteeing safe autonomous landing.
Generally, the problem of wind estimation is solved
for fixed-wing systems by use of a pitot tube [2]. Hereby,
the airspeed measurement is compared with a ground
velocity measurement from the GPS to provide the wind
velocity. In the case of a hovering (multi-copter) UAV,
a unidirectional airspeed sensor is practically infeasible,
because the flight direction varies strongly w.r.t the
vehicle’s body-fixed frame. Furthermore, the highly tur-
bulent airflow around the vehicle body caused by the
spinning propellers makes the placement of any kind
of airspeed sensor very inconvenient. For that reason,

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there have been some recent efforts [3]–[7] in model-based
wind estimation for multi-copter UAVs, with different
applications in mind.
In particular, Waslander et. al [6] have derived a model
for simulating wind, as well as a detailed theoretical
model of the different effects of wind on the body and
propeller forces of a quadcopter. The aim is to eliminate
the effect of wind on the model-based feedback position
control law. The result is a formula for inferring the wind
velocity from accelerometer measurements, validated by
simulation results. This model has been used by Abey-
wardena et al. [5], showing an increased accuracy in
position and velocity estimates by augmenting a visual-
inertial fusion framework with a wind velocity state.
The results have been validated in an experimental flight
setup using a vicon motion capture system. A different
application where an explicit wind velocity estimate is
needed has been demonstrated by Neumann et al. [4].
In their work, a gas-sensitive UAV is used for the task
of gas distribution mapping, where the prevailing wind
plays a major role in the motion of the detected gases.
They perform wind tunnel experiments to determine a
black-box static model, which maps the inclination angle
of the quadcopter to different freestream velocities.
To the best of our knowledge, there have been no
efforts addressing the wind estimation problem on a
hovering tailsitter UAV, modelling its aerodynamics and
observability of the wind vector. Furthermore, all previ-
ous work has relied on either wind tunnel data or indoor
motion capture systems.
The goals of this work have been to:
• derive and tune a grey-box model for the aerody-
namic forces acting on the Wingtra tailsitter UAV.
• develop a framework to estimate the wind velocity
vector in real-time.
• validate the wind estimation framework on outdoor
flight data.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows.
Section II introduces the system and the derived aerody-
namic model, as well a methodology for parameter iden-
tification. In Section III, we present the wind estimation
framework, followed by an overview of the experimental
setup and results in Section IV. Finally, conclusions are
drawn in Section V, along with a note on future work.
II. System Model
In this section, we describe the system at hand,
deriving an aerodynamic model, which enables us to
infer the wind velocity from the ground velocity and
the 3-dimensional attitude estimates. The attitude and
ground velocity are assumed to be given by the main
state estimator through fusion of IMU, magnetometer
and GPS measurements. Thereafter, we present the
methodology used to identify the model parameters from
real flight data.
3946
A. System Overview
A schematic representation of the deployed system is
depicted in Fig. 2 in vertical hovering configuration. The
UAV is composed of a wing, equipped with two propellers
for vertical thrust, as well as roll control by differential
thrust. In the slipstream of the propellers, there are two
flaps at the trailing edge of the wing. The flaps are used
to control pitch and yaw, by deflecting the propeller
slipstream. For the remainder of this work we define the
body-fixed coordinate frame, as denoted in Fig. 2 by bx ,
by and bz .
Fig. 2: 3-dimensional model of the Wingtra S125 tailsit-
ter prototype with denoted body frame axes.
B. Aerodynamic Model
In order to determine the wind velocity incident on
the vehicles surface, we need to construct a model, which
maps the onboard sensor data to the wind velocity vector
I v W in the inertial (north-east) frame, in the following
form
I v W = f (I v G , φ, θ, ψ). (1)
Hereby the 3-dimensional attitude of the vehicle is de-
noted by its euler angles (in the Tait-Bryan convention):
roll φ, pitch θ and yaw ψ. The 2-dimensional ground
velocity vector in the inertial frame is denoted by I v G .
The attitude and ground velocity states are assumed to
be given by the main state estimation framework running
onboard the autopilot by fusion of IMU, GPS and magne-
tometer measurements. Note that throughout this paper
we use a leading subscript to denote a vector’s reference
frame. We use the subscript I for the 2-dimensional
inertial north-east frame and B  , when rotated around
the vehicle’s yaw angle ψ.
In the following, we describe the wind model
f (I v G , φ, θ, ψ), derived from first principle equations of
aerodynamic forces acting on the vehicles body. Primar-
ily, in section II-B.1, we infer the horizontal freestream
velocity I v ∞ , i.e. the relative speed of the the air far
upstream from the UAV w.r.t. the vehicle’s body. In a
second step - described in section II-B.2 - we include the
ground velocity states to obtain the wind vector as the
difference between freestream and ground velocities.
1) Freestream velocity: To determine the freestream
velocity I v ∞ , we consider the forces acting on the vehicle
body in steady-state flight, i.e. at a constant freestream
velocity and constant altitude. Without loss of generality,
we consider the 2-dimensional case with only frontal
horizontal freestream velocity v∞ and drop all indices
for 3-dimensional reference frames. The same model is
applied to the lateral freestream velocity and is regarded
as a analogous and decoupled problem. The prevailing
forces are depicted in the free body diagram in Fig. 3.
Hereby, fT denotes the total thrust force produced by the
propellers, fG denotes the gravitational force pointing
downwards and fL and fD denote the aerodynamic lift
and drag forces acting on the wing surface. To maintain
the steady-state of constant freestream and altitude, the
aircraft is tilted by the pitch angle θ. Assuming a flat-
plate model [8], the equations for the lift and drag forces
are given by
1 2
||fL ||2 = cL ρA sin(θ) cos(θ)v∞ , (2)
2 small, meaning that higher tilt angles are needed to move
1 with a certain velocity relative to the air.
||fD ||2 = cD ρA cos2 (θ)v∞
2
, (3)
2 Furthermore, we extend the model by two parameters
with cL and cD being the lift and drag coefficients,
ρ being the air density and A being the wing area.
Additionally, the gravitational force is given by
||fG ||2 = mg. (4)
Fig. 3: 2-D free body diagram for frontal freestream
velocity (side view of the wing).
3947
With the help of the trigonometric relationships dis-
played in the equilibrium of forces in the bottom left
corner of Fig. 3 and equations (2) - (4), we can solve for
v∞ . This provides us with the following mapping of pitch
angles θ to freestream velocities v∞


2mg tan |θ|
v∞ = ± = ±kx tan |θ|. (5)
cD ρA
with the lumped parameter kx .
We conclude that the frontal component of the hori-
zontal freestream velocity can be modelled as the square
root tangent of the pitch angle θ, scaled by a coefficient
kx . Conveniently, we apply the same model to the y-axis
of the vehicle’s body, mapping the roll angle φ to the lat-
eral freestream velocity, with a scaling factor ky . Whereas
the flat-plate assumption cannot be directly justified
for lateral freestream, it has shown a reasonable fit on
empirical data (see section II-C). Intuitively, the scaling
factor k describes the relationship between constant tilt
angles and constant freestream velocities at the steady-
state. For high drag and lift forces, the factor k becomes
to include asymmetries along the bx axis:
• As the wing is slightly tilted w.r.t the fuselage and
IMU in positive pitch direction, we introduce an
offset parameter ox .
• Because the curvature of the fuselage is significantly
different and also the wing’s airfoil is asymmetric,
we split the scaling parameter into separate scaling
factors kx+ and kx− for positive and negative pitch
angles respectively.
By rotating the resulting freestream velocities around the
yaw angle ψ with the transformation matrix
 
cos(ψ) − sin(ψ)
Tψ = , (6)
sin(ψ) cos(ψ)
we obtain north and east components of the horizontal
freestream velocity, given by
   
kx+ tan(|θ|)I{θ>0} − kx− tan(|θ|)I{θ≤0} + ox
I v ∞ = Tψ

−ky sign(φ) tan(|φ|)
(7)
with I{.} being the indicator function taking the value 1,
if the condition {.} is satisfied and the value 0 otherwise.
Notably, the derived model assumes zero freestream ve-
locity in vertical direction. A further simplification is that
we do not explicitly consider the downward airstream
caused by the spinning propellers, which is highly tur-
bulent and therefore difficult to quantify. The effect is
assumed to be captured by the parameter identification
with real data.
 2) Wind Triangle: Converting the freestream velocity
obtained in section II-B.1 into wind velocities is trivial
given a reliable estimate for the ground velocities. We
apply the so-called wind triangle [4], shown in Fig. 4,
which simply states that the vector of wind velocities
vW is equal to the difference between the freestream
velocity v∞ (relative speed of air to UAV) and the
ground velocity vG (relative speed of ground to UAV).
We obtain the following equation for inferring the wind
speed vector

I vW = f (I v G , φ, θ, ψ) = I v ∞ − I v G . (8)
with I v ∞ obtained from equation (7) as a function of (a) Roll maneuver
the angles φ, θ and ψ.

Fig. 4: Wind Triangle

C. Parameter Identification
(b) Pitch maneuver
In order to complete the theoretical model, derived
with multiple strong assumptions in section II-B.1, em- Fig. 5: Constant tilt angle and altitude flight maneuvers
pirical data is needed. We perform outdoor flight ma- for roll and pitch.
neuvers to identify values for kx+ , kx− , ox and ky ,
as well as quantify the model uncertainty used for the
estimation framework in Section III. The flights are
performed outdoors with almost no wind, so we can wind bias B  bW . Hence, we approximate the freestream
consider the measured ground velocities as a measure for velocity, by using the measured ground velocity B  v G ,
the freestream velocity v∞ (see section II-B.2). corrected by the wind bias B  bW as follows
Specifically, to determine the parameters for the static
model in equation (8), we fly the system in steady state v
B ∞
= B  v G − B  bW (10)
at multiple tilt angles and measure the corresponding
ground velocities. The maneuvers are performed along
1) Roll maneuvers: The measured roll angles are
both bx and by axes separately, with constant pitch and
transformed by the model function from equation (7),
roll angles respectively. An example is depicted in Fig.
5.
obtaining  the augmented independent variable xi =
sign(φi ) tan |φi | for every data point i ∈ 1, 2, ..., Ni re-
Hereby, we denote the measured world frame ground
spectively. As the dependent variable corresponding to
velocity I v G , rotated by the yaw angle with Tψ as
  xi , we use the approximate freestream velocity yi =
 v G[x]
v
B  ∞[y] ,i
. We perform a weighted linear least squares
 B
v = Tψ I vG =
B G
(9) regression (WLLS), using the weights wi to normalise
v
B  G[y]
the data w.r.t to the number of data points collected for
To correct for biases caused by slight winds, the every segment of a certain angle/velocity pair. This is
maneuvers have been performed in successive pairs of to eliminate the bias towards the more densely sampled
opposite direction by changing heading (i.e. yaw angle) parts of the measured range. For the by -model, the
by 180◦ . Assuming constant wind throughout such a regression is constrained to a line through the origin,
pair of successive measurements, the arithmetic mean as the UAV is assumed to be symmetric along the by
between the average measured ground velocities corre- axis. The optimal scale factor ky∗ is obtained from the
sponds directly to the wind speed, which we call the roll maneuvers by the following optimization

3948
 Ni 
  2

ky∗
= argmin wi ky xi − yi . (11)
ky i=1
2) Pitch maneuvers: For the bx -model, the dependent
variable is extended, to obtain the bx -axis parameters
stacked in the vector kx = (kx+ , kx− , ox ). We obtain the
extended dependent variable by
⎛  ⎞
I{θi >0} tan |θi |
xi = ⎝I{θi ≤0} tan |θi |⎠ .
1
The rest of the WLLS regression is analogous to the
one performed on the roll maneuvers. We acquire the
optimal parameter set kx by the following optimisation
Ni 
  2

kx∗
= argmin wi kx xi − yi . (12)
kx i=1
Fig. 6 depicts the resulting model fit, plotting the
freestream velocities yi against the tilt angles for each
of the roll and pitch maneuvers.
III. Estimation Framework
In order to reliably estimate the wind velocity, we use a
Kalman filter formulation [9], tracking the 2-dimensional
wind velocity vector I v W in the inertial north-east frame,
as well as a 2 × 2 covariance matrix P , capturing the
uncertainty about the states. The Kalman filter starts
with an initial guess for the state and covariance and Fig. 6: Model fit from constant tilt angle and altitude
then recursively alternates between a propagation step flight maneuvers for roll (upper) and pitch (lower). The
and a measurement step. measured data points (blue, transparent) are plotted into
A. Propagation Step a tilt angle to freestream velocity frame. The system
Typically, the propagation step is based on a process model with optimal parameters (red, solid) is shown with
model, which in this case captures the expected behavior 3σ-bounds (red, shaded area).
of wind and serves as a prediction of the wind speeds
between incoming measurements. In general, wind ve-
locity is known to constitute a dominant static part The covariance matrix Q of the noise parameter ηp
and a highly uncertain dynamic part, the wind gusts. can be tuned to capture the expected dynamic range of
For reference on the dynamic range of wind, a common wind.
model for simulating wind is the Dryden Gust Model [10].
It models the wind as a power spectral density (PSD) B. Measurement Step
function with a dominant static part at frequency 0 rad/s, In this step, we use the sensor measurements to obtain
and a dynamic part in the range of 0.1 − 1.5 rad/s. the inferred wind velocity vector I ṽ W , determined by
Due to this highly uncertain behavior, for the purpose equation (8). Along with a covariance matrix R, these
of prediction in the given Kalman filter, north and east are plugged into the Kalman filter at the measurement
wind speeds are best modelled by random walk step
xk+1 = xk + ηp (13) z = I ṽ W + ηm , (15)

with process noise ηp ∼ N (0, Q), modeled as additive where z is the measurement used as input to the
Gaussian noise. Hereby, xk denotes the state vector at Kalman filter, constituting the inferred wind speed vec-
the discrete timestep k. In this case, the state vector tor I ṽ W with additive Gaussian measurement noise
x corresponds to the north and east components of the ηm ∼ N (0, R).
wind velocity The uncertainty about the measurement model is
  threefold:
vW[N ] • The state variance of the attitude estimates φ, θ
x = I vW = . (14)
vW[E] and ψ is given by the main state estimator by

3949
 fusion of IMU and magnetometer measurements.
When propagated from quaternions to euler an-
gles and then through the wind model from equa-
tion (8), it amounts to a variance in the range of
10−6 −10−3 m2/s2 on the wind states.
• The state variance of the ground velocity vector I v G
is also given by the main state estimator by fusion
of IMU, magnetometer and GPS measurements. It
lies in the range of 0.02−0.2 m2/s2 .
• The modelling error quantified by the residual errors
rx and ry of the regressions from equations (12) and
(11) amount to rx = 0.09 m2/s2 and ry = 0.36 m2/s2
and are fixed to the vehicles body frame.
Evidently, the contribution of the attitude variance to
the wind estimate is a at least two orders of magnitude
smaller than both other error sources and can therefore
be neglected in this framework. The most dominant
source of uncertainty, namely the modelling error, is
composed of two body-fixed noise parameters rx and ry ,
which are propagated to the wind velocity estimates by
rotation around the yaw angle ψ. As for the uncertainty
about the ground velocity vector I v G , it is given in the
inertial north-east frame directly and is denoted by rN
and rE . Hence, the overall measurement noise matrix R
can be computed as
Fig. 7: Kalman filter flowgraph showing the process
   
r 0 r 0 model used in the propagation step (A) and the mea-
R = Tψ x Tψ + N . (16)
0 ry 0 rE surement model used for the measurement step (B).

It is worthy to note, that an alternative formulation of

the measurement noise which includes the attitude state
variances would be possible using an implicit Extended
Kalman Filter as described in [11]. However, this involves
linearisations, which drastically increase computation
time and as shown above provide negligible contribution
to the total error. Hence, we choose the computationally
efficient solution, which can run seamlessly on the UAV’s
microcontroller.
IV. Experiments and Results
In this section, we present the performed validation
experiments and evaluate the resulting wind estimate
provided by the Kalman filter, benchmarked against
ground truth data which we acquire with an external
wind measurement setup.
A. Validation Experiments
The proposed wind estimation framework has been
implemented onboard the UAV’s autopilot, which de-
ploys a modified version of the PX4 flight stack [12].
The board runs an STM32 microcontroller with 256
kbit random access memory (RAM) and a 180 MHz
processor with single-precision floating point unit (FPU).
The implementation is in C++ and is very light-weight
due to the efficient formulation of the Kalman filter, as
well as the ability to run at much lower frequency than
other modules, given the relatively slow wind dynamics.
TABLE I: Ground truth wind measurement specifica-
tions.
Wind speed Wind direction
Measurement accuracy ±5% ±7◦
Output resolution 0.01 m/s 22.5◦
Output frequency 0.1 Hz 0.1 Hz
The onboard estimator has been tested in real flight
tests. In this case, we fly the UAV with different maneu-
vers on a day with wind speeds ranging from 0−6 m/s.
For reference, we use an external wind measurement
setup, composed of a cup anemometer measuring wind
speed and a wind vane measuring the wind direction. The
measurement setup is placed at approx. 4.5 m height (∼
flight altitude) and at a distance of approx. 20 m away
from the vehicle.
The reference wind measurements are delivered at a
rate of 0.1 Hz, providing a measurement of the average
wind speed and direction over time segments of 10 s. The
output resolution and measurement accuracy, as given by
the data sheet, are listed in Table I for wind speed and
direction respectively.
It is worthy to note, that the sensor specifications
of the wind measurement setup cause a considerable
limitation in evaluating the estimation results. Most
significantly, as seen in Table I, the wind direction mea-

3950
surements are delivered every 10 seconds at a resolution
of 22.5 ◦ and an internal measurement error of up to 7 ◦ .
This allows us to validate the general performance of the
wind estimator, however we cannot determine a true esti-
mation error with the current ground truth measurement
setup. Therefore, in this section we merely speak of an
approximate estimation error as an evaluation measure
for the estimation of wind speed and direction.
The flight maneuvers performed to validate the wind
estimates include combinations of holding the vehicle’s
position against the wind (non-zero tilt angles), as well
as holding zero tilt angle and letting the vehicle’s position
drift with the wind. This has allowed decoupling the
effects of the different terms in equation (8) and has
helped in tuning the estimator parameters. Furthermore,
the experiments have been performed at a range of
varying orientations, i.e. yaw angles, to evaluate the mea-
surement model along both body-frame axes separately,
as well as coupled pitch/roll tilt angles.
B. Estimation Results
In the following, we evaluate the performance of the
proposed approach, demonstrating the results on a rep-
resentative data set1 To compare the estimated states
to the ground truth data, we convert the wind velocity
vector into direction and magnitude to match the sensor
output.
1) Wind Direction: The upper plot in Fig. 8 depicts
the estimated wind direction compared to the direction
delivered by the wind sensor at 0.1 Hz. Additionally, we
have plotted the mean estimated wind direction over 10 s
intervals to match the sensor output for better visual
evaluation. We can see that the estimated direction is
well aligned with the ground truth and remains stable
w.r.t. changes in the yaw angle. The lower plot in Fig.
8 shows the approximate estimation error, i.e. the dif-
ference between the estimated and the measured wind
direction, with a mean error of approximately 15◦ .
It is important to note, that the approximate esti-
mation error of 15◦ falls into the same range of the
measurement error of the wind vane, which is ±7◦ with
a further depreciation by the crude output resolution of
22.5◦ . Furthermore, the sample frequency of the ground
truth is by a factor of 500 smaller than the recorded
estimate. Therefore, we cannot determine wether the
sensor measurement or the estimated wind direction is
closer to the true wind direction. We conclude that the
estimation in terms of wind direction is valid and it is
not possible to quantify further improvements to the
estimation accuracy with the current ground truth setup.
1 For practical and weather dependent reasons, the validation
set was collected on the predecessor of the prototype presented in
the section II, however the modelling and estimation approach is
identical. In section II, we chose to present the modelling data from
the airframe with more pronounced asymmetries along the bx axis
to emphasize the generalisability of the model.
3951
50
Angle [◦ ]
0
−50
−100
0 50 100 150 200 250
Time [s]
60
Angle [◦ ]
40
20
50 100 150 200 250
Time [s]
Fig. 8: Top: The estimated wind direction is plotted
(blue, solid), along with its mean value over 10 second
segments (blue, dots). The ground truth measurement of
the wind direction (red, stars) is plotted for reference, as
well as the UAV’s heading, i.e. yaw angle ψ (blue dashed
line). Bottom: The estimation error (blue, circles), i.e. the
difference between the average estimated and measured
wind direction at 10 second intervals is plotted along with
the output resolution of the wind vane (red, dashed line)
at 22.5 ◦ .
2) Wind Speed: Along the same evaluation criteria,
we observe the resulting magnitude of the wind velocity
estimate in Fig. 9, as we did for the wind direction.
The top plot shows the estimated wind speed com-
pared to the averaged wind speed provided by the wind
sensor at 0.1 Hz. As with the wind direction, we have
plotted the mean estimated wind speed over 10 s match-
ing the sensor output. Notice, the steep convergence from
an arbitrary initialisation of 4 m/s towards the ground
truth measurement within the first 2 seconds. On the
bottom plot, we can see the residuals between the esti-
mated wind speed and the ground truth measurements,
with a mean difference below 0.4 m/s. This corresponds
to a relative error below 25%, clearly larger than mea-
surement accuracy of the ground truth sensor. We con-
firm the validity of the estimate within the presented
estimation error, showing that there is still room for
improvement in terms of magnitude of the estimated
wind velocity.
Overall, the wind estimator shows promising quali-
tative results. We have quantified the estimated wind
velocity within the constraints of the deployed mea-
surement setup. We see great potential for employing
the current wind estimate in applications that make
use of an approximate indication of wind speed and
direction, e.g. high-level navigation laws. However, the
estimation accuracy of the real-time wind speed may
not be sufficient for applications with higher demands
on accuracy at fast-changing dynamics, e.g. model-based
 Wind speed [m/s] Wind speed [m/s]
3 Kalman filter, which consider the aerodynamic moment,
2 as well as the actuation response. Moreover, deriving a
1 dynamic model could help estimate fast-changing wind
0 50 100 150 200
Time [s]
1.5
1 continuously providing support. Special thanks to Carl
0.5
50 100 150 200
Time [s]
Fig. 9: Top: The estimated wind speed is plotted (blue,
solid), along with its mean value over 10 second segments
(blue, dots). The ground truth measurement of the wind
speed (red, stars) is plotted for reference. Bottom: The
estimation error (blue, circles), i.e. the difference between
the average estimated and measured wind speed at 10
second intervals.
feedback control.
V. Conclusion and Future Work
A simplistic framework for estimating the wind sur-
rounding a hovering UAV is presented in this paper.
Specifically for the tailsitter design, this opens up a range
of possibilities for designing adaptive control strategies,
that can achieve more robust flight amidst wind distur-
bances. The proposed estimation framework uses only
the standard onboard sensor suite and is based on a grey-
box model of the airframe’s aerodynamics. This allows
for simple generalisation to various airframes. The model
formulation is decoupled for each of the horizontal body-
frame axes, to facilitate asymmetric designs such as the
VTOL tailsitter. The uncertainty in the observed wind
velocity vector is captured by the Kalman filter and nat-
urally propagated to the state uncertainty. Furthermore,
the experiments designed to tune the model parameters
involve outdoor flight of simple maneuvers, eliminating
the dependency on a wind tunnel or motion capture
system, which often pose practical constraints. Finally,
the wind estimation has been evaluated in real flight
tests and compared to a ground truth measurement. The
results have been successful with an approximate estima-
tion error below 15 ◦ in wind direction and 0.4 m/s in wind
magnitude. Notably, the deviation of the estimated wind
direction from the measured direction lies within the
range of measurement accuracy and output resolution
of the sensor itself.
The result of this work is a ready-to-use estimate of the
wind speed and direction, which can be used for adaptive
control strategies, e.g. autonomous landing or energy
optimised hovering. Further improvements to the wind
estimator can include adding measurement models to the
250 gusts, as opposed to the static model derived in this work.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to emphasize their gratitude
to the whole Wingtra team for inspiring this work and
Olsson and Michal Stasiak for their time and effort on
several long field testing sessions.
250
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