A Study of the Wind Sensing Performance of Small Pusher and Puller Hexacopters

Abstract

This paper presents a study comparing the performance of puller and pusher multirotors inferring time-varying wind velocity fluctuations from vehicle motion in hovering flight. For this analysis, linear models approximating the closed-loop airframe dynamics of pusher and puller multirotors were characterized from system identification experiments. The identified linear models were then used to synthesize a state observer for puller and pusher configurations. To validate wind estimation results based on vehicle motion, field experiments were performed in which the multirotors were stationed in hover above the ground at the center of a sensor array consisting of four sonic anemometers arranged in a tetrahedron configuration. Results from validation experiments show that puller and pusher hexacopters have comparable performance measuring wind velocity, but the pusher hexacopter platform was found to resolve time-varying wind fluctuations more accurately based on frequency-domain analysis of coherence and phase lag. The ease with which model-based estimation can be implemented for puller and pusher aircraft’s, further support the use of multirotors to infer wind velocity variations in the lower atmosphere.