Abstract
Effective wind gust rejection and stable hovering are critical for the outdoor operation of autonomous drones. However, existing gust rejection methods are primarily reactive, inferring the disturbance from the resulting motion or measuring it at the airframe. Either way, the wind has already begun to act before it can be compensated. In this work, we anticipate the gust instead by measuring the wind ahead of the drone with a low-cost, low-weight pitot-static sensor mounted on a boom. The resulting wind preview is incorporated into a nonlinear model predictive controller (MPC), which optimizes the drone motion while anticipating wind disturbances. A longer boom offers more preview time but adds inertia and degrades flight performance. We characterize this trade-off in simulation and show that the optimal preview distance is not a fixed property of the platform, but shifts with the wind speed and with how quickly the drone can respond. Indoor hardware experiments confirm the trend and show that the proposed controller substantially improves hover performance against a PX4 baseline and an otherwise identical wind-unaware MPC. Outdoor experiments show that the error along the wind direction is reduced by 54 percent with respect to the baseline, demonstrating that a single wind-aligned sensor can significantly improve hovering performance.
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Publication details
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Meere, B., Wisse, E., Vousten, L., Doodeman, S., Torta, E., Chanfreut, P., & Antunes, D. (2026). Onboard Wind-Preview Model Predictive Control Using Pitot-Static Sensing for Multirotor UAVs. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/onboard-wind-preview-model-predictive-control-using-pitot-static-sensing-for-multirotor-uavs
MLA 9
Meere, Bas, et al. "Onboard Wind-Preview Model Predictive Control Using Pitot-Static Sensing for Multirotor UAVs." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/onboard-wind-preview-model-predictive-control-using-pitot-static-sensing-for-multirotor-uavs.
Chicago (author–date)
Meere, Bas, Eline Wisse, Laurens Vousten, Sander Doodeman, Elena Torta, Paula Chanfreut, and Duarte Antunes. 2026. "Onboard Wind-Preview Model Predictive Control Using Pitot-Static Sensing for Multirotor UAVs." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/onboard-wind-preview-model-predictive-control-using-pitot-static-sensing-for-multirotor-uavs.
Harvard
Meere, B., Wisse, E., Vousten, L., Doodeman, S., Torta, E., Chanfreut, P. and Antunes, D. (2026) 'Onboard Wind-Preview Model Predictive Control Using Pitot-Static Sensing for Multirotor UAVs', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/onboard-wind-preview-model-predictive-control-using-pitot-static-sensing-for-multirotor-uavs.
Vancouver
Meere B, Wisse E, Vousten L, Doodeman S, Torta E, Chanfreut P, et al. Onboard Wind-Preview Model Predictive Control Using Pitot-Static Sensing for Multirotor UAVs. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/onboard-wind-preview-model-predictive-control-using-pitot-static-sensing-for-multirotor-uavs
IEEE
B. Meere, E. Wisse, L. Vousten, S. Doodeman, E. Torta, P. Chanfreut, and D. Antunes, "Onboard Wind-Preview Model Predictive Control Using Pitot-Static Sensing for Multirotor UAVs," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/onboard-wind-preview-model-predictive-control-using-pitot-static-sensing-for-multirotor-uavs.