Estimation of Aircraft States and Wind Exposure

Abstract

This paper presents an application of the Square Root Unscented Kalman Filter (SRUKF) to the estimation problem of aircraft system states and the atmospheric wind the aircraft is exposed to. The aircraft is controlled by an LQR-based feedback controller to y the aircraft with commanded airspeed, altitude and yaw rate. The estimation is based on measurements from conventional auto-pilot sensors. Simulation experiments show that the estimation algorithm can successfully estimate the states of the aircraft model as well as time-varying wind vector.