Influence on distributed airport site selection from ground-effect wind field of UAV

Abstract

It is one of the key steps of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) autonomously cruising to touch down the distributed airport automatically and accurately. The ground-effect wind field is one of the main factors to influence the touching down precision of UAV. In order to explore how much the ground-effect wind field influence the touching down precision, this paper chooses a quadrotor UAV with 400mm diameter as the research object, establishes the model of UAV and the ground-effect wind field, analyzes the touching down results while the distributed airport is at the opening and flat scene, the scene with single-sided vertical obstacle and the scene with bi-symmetrical vertical obstacles respectively. The experimental results show that: (1) there is little affection on the accuracy of touching down when the distributed airport is at the opening and flat scene. (2) The ground-effect wind field has great affection on the accuracy of touching down when the distributed airport is at the scene with single-sided vertical obstacle. If the distance between the UAV and the single-sided vertical obstacle is less than 1 meter, the UAV is very easy to overturn. (3) When the distributed airport is at the scene with bi-symmetrical vertical obstacles, the accuracy of touching down is decided by the height of the vertical obstacle. The investigation of this paper is very significant to select the location of distributed airport.