Real-time estimation of atmospheric disturbance for unmanned helicopter based on multi-source navigation data

In order to improve the position control precision of unmanned helicopter in complex air-flow field, it is necessary to obtain the real-time and high-accuracy atmospheric disturbance information by means of measurement or estimation, which is used to compensate the disturbance in real-time. A scheme of air disturbance data estimation for Unmanned Helicopter based on multi-source navigation data fusion is proposed in this paper. The information obtained by navigation system of the unmanned helicopter is used to establish the functional relationship between navigation data and atmospheric parameters. In addition, the multi-source information fusion algorithm is researched to achieve a real-time estimation of wind field information of unmanned helicopter. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed atmospheric disturbance data estimation method for unmanned helicopter, we design a simulation system which can repeat the flight path and the different flight state of unmanned helicopter. It can also simulate the disturbance of different wind fields to navigation system and the estimation process of air disturbance information to verify the proposed algorithm. The results show that the designed method can effectively estimate atmospheric disturbance information, and has wonderful performance with high precision, favorable stability and robustness. The Navigation Research Center (NRC) of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (http://nrc.nuaa.edu.cn) is engaged in the research of navigation technology, and has done a series of research on all source information fusion. Up to now, a great deal of achievement has been made in the following fields: Strap-down Inertial Navigation System, Inertial Integrated Navigation System, Global Satellite Positioning System, Terrain Aided Navigation System, Fault-Tolerant Technique of Multi Inertial Navigation Subsystem, Modern Optimization Filtering Theory, Precision Measurement System and so on.