• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.859-866
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• 2009

The article discusses an issue of estimating the airspeed of an autonomous flying vehicle. Airspeed is the difference between ground speed and wind speed. It is desirable to know any two among the three speeds for navigation, guidance and control of an autonomous vehicle. For example, ground speed and position are used to guide a vehicle to a target point and wind speed and airspeed are used to maximize flight performance such as a gliding range. However, the target vehicle has not an airspeed sensor but a ground speed sensor (GPS/INS). So airspeed or wind speed has to be estimated. Here, airspeed is to be estimated. A vehicle's dynamics and its dynamic parameters are used to estimate airspeed with attitude and angular speed measurements. Kalman filter is used for the estimation. There are also two major sources arousing a robust estimation problem; wind speed and altitude. Wind speed and direction depend on weather conditions. Altitude changes as a vehicle glides down to the ground. For one reference altitude, multiple model Kalman filters are pre-designed based on several reference airspeeds. We call this group of filters as a cluster. Filters of a cluster are activated simultaneously and probabilities are calculated for each filter. The probability indicates how much a filter matches with measurements. The final airspeed estimate is calculated by summing all estimates multiplied by probabilities. As a vehicle glides down to the ground, other clusters that have been designed based on other reference altitudes are activated. Some numerical simulations verify that the proposed method is effective to estimate airspeed.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Aeronautical & Space Sciences
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.107-113
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• 2019

In this paper, a robust filter based wind velocity estimation algorithm without an air velocity sensor in an air vehicle is presented. The wind velocity is useful information for the air vehicle to perform precise guidance and control. In general, the wind velocity can be obtained by subtracting an air velocity which is obtained by an air velocity sensor such as a pitot-tube, and a ground velocity which is obtained by a navigation equipment. However, in order to simplify the configuration of the air vehicle, the wind estimation algorithm is necessary because the wind velocity can not be directly obtained if the air velocity measurement sensor is not used. At this time, the aerodynamic coefficient of the air vehicle changes due to the turbulence, which causes the uncertainty of the system model of the filter, and the wind estimation performance deteriorates. Therefore, in this study, we propose a wind estimation method using $H{\infty}$ filter to ensure robustness against aerodynamic coefficient uncertainty, and we confirmed through simulation that the proposed method improves the performance in the uncertainty of aerodynamic coefficient.