Wind Aided Aerodynamic Characteristics in the Quadcopter UAV Control Modeling

Quadcopter UAVs are always exposed to time-varying winds in the flight process, which makes it much more challenging to be detected and recognized by radar systems. Conventional solutions are to estimate and reject the wind aided adverse impacts, while in this paper we regard the wind aided aerodynamic characteristics as prior environmental information rather than disturbance. In particular, we establish a Matlab Simulink based quadcopter UAV control model in wind environment which is composed of wind shear, turbulence and gusts, and investigate the wind aided velocity and Doppler frequency fluctuations in a modeling and simulation way since the wind aided aerodynamic characteristics of the quadcopter UAV are difficult to be described in mathematical expressions. The simulation results reveal that: (1) the wind gusts are the primary components for the velocity and Doppler frequency fluctuations; (2) the impacts of wind turbulence are negligible due to the quad-copter UAVs’ wind resistance capability; (3) the impacts of the wind shear can be transformed between horizontal and vertical dimensions as a consequence of the coupling effect.