Vehicle-State-Aware Confidence Estimation for Direct Wind Sensing on a Multirotor

Overview & Synopsis

Direct wind sensing from a multi-rotor UAV enables localized atmospheric measurements, but the reliability of the anemometer depends on vehicle motion. This work presents a vehicle-state-aware confidence method that uses horizontal and vertical vehicle speed to quantify the acquisition of each wind observation. The resulting confidence score is used to adapt measurement influence to a two-dimensional vector estimator. Experiments were conducted during horizontal translation, vertical motion, and held-out autonomous waypoint flight. The proposed two-feature formulation achieved an ROC-AUC of 0.995, with 98.84% of translation observations identified as unreliable. The confidence-aware adaptation reduced median estimator gain during translation from 0.207 to 0.064 while retaining median gain of 0.151 during hover. The results show that vehicle state provides useful proprioceptive context for regulating the influence of direct airborne wind observations.