Real-Time Wind Field Estimation and Pitot Tube Calibration Using an Extended Kalman Filter

Qian Zhang, Yifan Xu, Xueyun Wang, Zelong Yu and Tianyi Deng
Additional contact information
Qian Zhang: School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Yifan Xu: School of Instrumentation Science and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Xueyun Wang: School of Instrumentation Science and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Zelong Yu: School of Instrumentation Science and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China
Tianyi Deng: School of Instrumentation Science and Opto-Electronics Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

Mathematics, 2021, vol. 9, issue 6, 1-16

Abstract: The airspeed is an important feedback signal for flight control, and its measurement accuracy is related to the safety of aircraft, especially for hybrid vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in the transition phase. However, offline calibration of the pitot tube cannot fully simulate the situation in real cases, and this is why online calibration after installation is necessary. In addition, the environmental wind field creates a high risk for the conversion flight of a hybrid UAV, thus real-time wind field measurement of the flight field has great significance for the flight path planning of the conversion process. In this article, an innovative method for online calibration of pitot tube and wind field estimation is proposed. After establishing the extended Kalman filter (EKF) for estimation, an analysis method is proposed to analyze the observability of EKF under different flight strategies. Then, the hovering flight is selected as the experimental flight trajectory. The laboratory computer simulation and flight experiment results validate the theory and prove that the proposed method could re-calibrate the scale factor of the pitot tube and estimate the wind field.

Keywords: unmanned aerial vehicle; airspeed; calibration; extended kalman filter; wind field (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/6/646/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/9/6/646/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:9:y:2021:i:6:p:646-:d:519386

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematics is currently edited by Ms. Emma He

More articles in Mathematics from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().