The identification of the wind parameters based on the interactive multi-models

© 2020 Tech Science Press. All rights reserved. The wind as a natural phenomenon would cause the derivation of the pesticide drops during the operation of agricultural unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). In particular, the changeable wind makes it difficult for the precision agriculture. For accurate spraying of pesticide, it is necessary to estimate the real-time wind parameters to provide the correction reference for the UAV path. Most estimation algorithms are model based, and as such, serious errors can arise when the models fail to properly fit the physical wind motions. To address this problem, a robust estimation model is proposed in this paper. Considering the diversity of the wind, three elemental time-related Markov models with carefully designed parameter α are adopted in the interacting multiple model (IMM) algorithm, to accomplish the estimation of the wind parameters. Furthermore, the estimation accuracy is dependent as well on the filtering technique. In that regard, the sparse grid quadrature Kalman filter (SGQKF) is employed to comprise the computation load and high filtering accuracy. Finally, the proposed algorithm is ran using simulation tests which results demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority in tracking the wind change.