Preliminary Study of Gust Response Evaluation of Drones via Free-Flights in Gust Wind Tunnel

Abstract

For commercial applications of small unmanned aerial vehicles such as infrastructure monitoring, agricultural missions, and small-package deliveries, a tolerance for gusty wind conditions is one of the most important performance factors that need to be considered to make them practical to use. However, there is no standard for the performance evaluation of gust tolerance. In this study, free flight gust response testing method using a motion capture based precise flight control is proposed. A prototype of the tesing system using JAXA's low-speed wind tunnel (LWT2) was constructed, and gust response free flight demonstration was carried out successfully.