Development of wind-aware piloting interfaces and dynamic quadrotor simulator with spatiotemporally varying wind
Abstract
With increasing adoption of low-altitude Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in urban environments, alongside present-day research into low-altitude Urban Air Mobility (UAM) vehicles, there exists a need for high quality environmental feedback for pilots operating in dense urban areas. Currently, pilots have minimal awareness as to the wind conditions their aircraft is experiencing beyond natural perception and their previous weather observations. Our work is to develop wind-aware piloting interfaces that modify existing, popular software to provide this feedback in a natural and helpful manner. Furthermore, the development of simulation environments to enhance these interfaces and gather pilot feedback is desirable. Current dynamic quadrotor simulators have sparse support for wind velocities varying with time and space. Our work has resulted in the development of modifications to Microsoft's Airsim simulator to allow support for spatiotemporally varying winds pre-generated by high-fidelity computational fluid dynamics software. By developing improved interfaces and simulation capabilities, this research has the potential to spur further growth in the development of urban flight.