Wind Sensing and Estimation Using Small Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Survey

The general problem of wind sensing and estimation using small UAVs can be divided into two subproblems, such as wind sensing and estimation along the UAV flight trajectory at specific time and locations and wind field estimation by considering the spatio-temporal characteristics of wind. The classical wind sensing and estimation problem along the aircraft flight trajectory can be tackled by solving the wind triangulation. The most straightforward way for UAV-based wind sensing is to directly measure all the related states in the equation and perform direct calculations. Given measured or estimated wind information along the UAV trajectory, the spatio-temporal variations of the wind field can be further derived. This requires accurate wind measurements or estimates at specific time and locations, as well as appropriate models for accurate wind field interpolation, extrapolation, or reconstruction. The simplest approach is to assume that the wind field is frozen, or the wind field does not change in a relatively short time period.