Is it possible to estimate the wind speed?

[Umut John]

Hi,

Is it possible to find/estimate the speed of the wind, most profoundly, the headwind during the flight from what we normally have in the log files, without using an extra sensor, etc.?

Best

[Alex Kushleyev]

Hello @Umut-John,

The concept of estimating wind speed using a quadcopter is an interesting and complicated problem. We do not provide the software that implements this feature, but there are research papers you can read which discuss this topic. For example, I came across the following publication after a quick google search : https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17568293211070824 . I do not know how good this particular approach is (I did not read it in full detail), but this paper explains the key concepts involved in estimating the wind speed using a quadcopter, such as the need for accurate attitude estimation, characterization of air frame drag as function of tilt angle), and the authors propose a Kalman Filter approach which you can investigate.

Hopefully this gives you a good start - please do some more research!

Alex