Measuring the horizontal wind for forest fire monitoring using multiple UAVs

An approach for estimating the horizontal wind based on a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is presented in this paper. Since the forest fire behavior is vulnerable to the wind environment, this methodology is considered to apply for forest fire monitoring. Also, the proposed method is especially suitable for measurements on the commercial UAVs platforms, due to its characteristic that estimating wind speed without additional meteorological and flow sensors. The method is derived from the wind triangle in the condition that the ground speeds of vehicles require to be constant. By circularly fitting and locating the center of the airspeed samplings in the Cartesian plane, the wind speed can be retrieved. A recursive least-squares (RLS) estimator is designed to estimate the wind speed with on-line measurements collected by the fleet of UAVs. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated in a simulation environment.