2016 International Conference on

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)

June 7-10, 2016. Arlington, VA USA

ThCTT3.4

Disturbance Accomodation Control for

Wind Rejection of a Quadcopter
J. X. J. Bannwarth1 , Z. J. Chen1 , K. A. Stol1 , Member, IEEE, and B. A. MacDonald2 , Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract This paper investigates the rejection of wind
disturbances of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). UAVs are
used for increasingly complex operations that require a great
deal of accuracy and minimal position changes. This calls for
better disturbance rejection. The drag-inclusive dynamics of a
quadcopter are derived and used to create two uniaxial wind
disturbance rejection controllers: a disturbance accommodating
controller (DAC) and a nonlinear feedforward controller. Both
controllers are integrated into an open-source ight controller.
The performance of the controllers is assessed in simulation
against the unmodied baseline. Over a 60 second loiter test,
the DAC and nonlinear controllers result in a 45 % and 66 %
decrease in error compared to the baseline respectively. Both
controllers are shown to react to wind more rapidly. However,
the DAC is found to be affected by changes in wind speed due
to its linear nature. The baseline controller is used to show the
feasibility of rejecting the effects of a 5 meters per second wind
in a physical experiment.

on the minimization of drag through frame design, such

as Mnsson and Stenbergs [6], have the potential to yield
higher performance for new, specialized UAV.
Cho et al. [7] investigated the wind estimation and airspeed calibration of a plane by fusing pitot tube and GPS
measurements using an extended Kalman lter (EKF). Their
approach does not cover controller design but demonstrates
the feasibility of accurate wind sensing on a UAV.
Arain and Kendoul [8] investigated wind disturbance rejection of an octocopter by measuring wind speed using a
pitot tube. Wind information was used by a proportional
feedforward controller to determine the desired pitch angle
sent to low-level attitude controllers. Practical tests showed
improvements in root mean square (RMS) error along the
UAVs forward axis ranging from 17 % to 65 %, demonstrating the potential for utilization of onboard air speed sensing
for disturbance rejection. The feedforward controller used
in this work was experimentally tuned, but a model based
approach could yield superior performance.
This paper investigates wind disturbance rejection using
disturbance accommodating control (DAC) on a quadcopter
platform. Section II describes the physical system used. Section III covers the modeling of the problem. Section IV describes the creation of two different controllers: one using the
disturbance accommodating methodology, and one relying on
a nonlinear feedforward law. Section V presents simulation
results while Section VI presents preliminary experimental
results. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section VII and
future work is highlighted.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are well suited to a
wide variety of applications. They have been the subject of
extensive research in recent years. In particular, their popularity in the recreational, research, and commercial sectors has
surged, especially in the eld of precision agriculture. Their
ease of use and maneuverability make them t to be used as
remote sensing platforms [1] and sampling devices [2] for
agricultural applications.
Some applications such as large scale crop spraying [3] do
not require extremely precise platforms, so moderate changes
in position are acceptable. On the other hand, other applications involving close interaction with the environment,
such as canopy sampling [4] or short-range shots in lm
production require a high degree of accuracy. Minimizing
changes in position under such circumstances becomes of
the foremost importance.
Wind is a major disturbance source for all ying platforms.
Being able to remain stable and minimize wind disturbances
would increase the range of possible applications for UAVs.
Reactive approaches to wind rejection have been the
subject of prior research. As part of their investigation, Orsag
et al. [5] developed a low level controller performing wind
rejection. However, their method did not use a separate
wind sensor and reacted to changes in attitude rather than
directly reacting to the wind. Passive approaches relying

II. S YSTEM D ESCRIPTION

The UAV used in this study is shown in Fig. 1. It is a
small quadcopter with a rotor-to-rotor diameter of 0.46 m
and a mass of 1.5 kg. It can achieve a hover time of 15
minutes on a 3 A h battery. A list of system properties used
in this paper is included in Table I.
The quadcopter is controlled by a Pixhawk ight controller
running a modied version of the open-source APM Copter
3.3 rmware [9]. The ight controller was chosen for its wide
sensor interface libraries and the wealth of support material
available.
In addition to the ight controllers inbuilt inertial measurement unit, magnetic compass and barometer, the quadcopter is tted with external sensors. A LiDAR laser range
nder and pitot tube are used for altitude and wind speed
measurements respectively.
In parallel with this research a GPS and magnetic compass
emulator is being developed. It utilizes the motion capture

1 J. X. J. Bannwarth, Z. J. Chen, and K. A. Stol are with

the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Auckland,
Auckland 1010, New Zealand jban039@aucklanduni.ac.nz,

{zhenrong.chen,k.stol}@auckland.ac.nz

2 B. A. MacDonald is with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand

b.macdonald@auckland.ac.nz
978-1-4673-9333-1/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE

695

FRONT
1

4
Bx

w
v
By

Bz

(a)
x

y
z
Fig. 1.

(c)

Fig. 2. Top down view of the quadcopter and reference frames used.
(a) shows the wind frame W. (b) shows the inertial frame, O. , ,
and denote the counterclockwise rotation around the x-, y-, and z-axes
respectively. (c) shows the quadcopter. The body frame is denoted by B.
The forward axis of the quadcopter is coincident with B x.

system at the University of Auckland to transfer pose information to the ight controller through its GPS and compass
ports. This will allow for seamless transitions between indoor
and outdoor tests in the future.

Unless explicitly denoted with the B superscript, vectors are

assumed to be expressed in the inertial frame.
The quadcopters

position and orientationare expressed
and =
respectively.
as = x y z
Let , , and represent the roll, pitch, and yaw angles of
the quadcopter respectively. The linear

 and angular velocities
and
of the UAV are dened as B V = B vx B vy B vz



B
= B p B q B r respectively.
The rotation matrix from body to inertial frame is dened
as

III. M ODELING
This section describes the dynamics of the quadcopter
used. The assumptions made are listed and a complete
three-dimensional dynamic model is presented following
Luukkonens methodology [10]. Finally, a simplied two
dimensional model used for uniaxial wind rejection is presented.
A. Assumptions
The rigid body assumption is made for the frame and
motors. The model created assumes rotor friction and the
motor control dynamics are negligible. The mass is assumed
to be symmetrically distributed along the quadcopters roll,
pitch, and yaw axes.

C S C + S S
S S C C S
C C + S S
(1)
where Sa = sin a and Ca = cos a. The rotation matrix from
O 
inertial to body frame is thus denoted by B
OR = B R .
Likewise, the transformation for angular velocities from
inertial to body frame is dened as

C C
O

S C
R
=
B
S

B. Frames and Transformations

Fig. 2 shows the quadcopter and reference frames used. O
represents the inertial frame and B represents the body frame.

C S S S C
S S S + C C
C S

TABLE I

Q UADCOPTER PARAMETERS .

Description

Value

Distance from motor axles to

centre of mass of the quadcopter

0.23 m

1, ,4

Arm angles measured CCW

from the positive B x-axis

45 , 135 , 225 , 315

Total system mass

1.5 kg

Ixx

System MMOI about xx-axis

18 103 kg m2

Iyy

System MMOI about yy-axis

18 103 kg m2

Izz

System MMOI about zz-axis

36 103 kg m2

IM

Motor and rotor MMOI

6.9 106 kg m2

Rotor drag coefcient

0.43 106 kg m2

Rotor lift coefcient

8.2 106 kg m

(b)

Photograph of the quadcopter used.

Parameter

where

1
W = 0
0

= W

0
C
S

(2)

S
C S .
C C

C. Motor Modeling
A simple model accounting for the motors mass moment
of inertia IM , coefcient of viscous friction b, and lift
coefcient k is dened in this section. The total thrust B T
and total torque B applied on the body are obtained using
696

the following equations:

B

T=

4

i=1
4


BT


Ti , where B Ti = 0
0

i=1

0 ki2

(1)i (bi2 + IM i )

+ l cos i

sin i





(3)



WU

Faero

(4)
z

B Ti

where l, i , IM , and b are dened in Table I.

x

D. Equations of Motion



Let the state vector x = x x , control input u = ,
and disturbance input ud = W Uu . The resulting nonlinear
system can be expressed as:


x
(11)
x = f (x, u, ud ) =
cf,x
2
g tan u m
(ud + x2 )

where the drag force and moment, B FD and B MD , are

dened in Section III-E. The gyroscopic moment , gravity
vector g, and mass moment of inertia I are dened as
4

i=1


g=m 0


0

(1)i IM i

mg

Fig. 3. Simplied sideway diagram of the quadcopter subjected to wind

along the x-axis.

The system equations of motion in the body frame are:

= B mB V + B Rg + B T B FD (5)
mB V
O

IB = B IB V + + B B MD
(6)



The linearized model is dened as:


0 9.81

x = Ax + Bu + Bd ud
y = Cx

I = diag (Ixx , Iyy , Izz ) .

(12)
(13)

E. Drag Modeling
The A, B, Bd , and C matrices are obtained by linearizing
the nonlinear system around

A drag model accounting for the apparent wind speed is

described in this section. The drag force and moment are
dened as

B
FD = sgn B Vapp cf B Vapp B Vapp
(7)
B

B
B
B
MD = sgn cm
(8)

x = 0, u = eq (ud )

where ud is chosen as the operating wind speed. eq is the

static equilibrium pitch angle of the quadcopter assuming a
perfect height controller:


cf,x u2d
eq (ud ) = arctan
.
(15)
mg

where is the Hadamard product (element-wise multiplication) and sgn(a) is the signum function. cf and cm are
vectors of translational and rotational drag constants. The
apparent velocity vector B Vapp is a combination of the
translational velocity B V and the wind vector W U:
B

(14)

The wind model is dened as

B O
W
O RW R U

Vapp = V
(9)

W
Uu W Uv W Uw
where W U =
and O
=
WR
diag (1, 1, 1). The wind frame of reference is shown in
Fig. 2a.

z = z
ud = z
where

0
=
1

F. Linear Model and Wind Modeling

The disturbance accommodating controller described in
Section IV-C requires a linearized model of the system
along the wind direction. Fig. 3 shows a simplied twodimensional diagram of the system. The oncoming wind is
denoted by W Uu . The resulting drag force is denoted by
Faero . The UAVs height controller is assumed to be perfect
and maintain z = 0. Changes in pitch angle are assumed to
result in negligible changes in perceived wind speed, which
enables the drag force to be estimated by


W

Uu , = cf,x W Uu + x  W Uu + x . (10)
Faero x,


0
, = 0
0

(16)
(17)


1 .

IV. C ONTROLLER D ESIGN

A. Control Objectives
1) Minimize changes in attitude due to wind: The quadcopter should be able to loiter at a target location with
minimal changes in pose. The x, y, and z RMS position
tracking errors should be minimized.
2) No stability compromise: The newly designed loiter
controllers should not compromise the lower level controllers stability.
697

BT

des UAV with

des Attitude
des Controller

Loiter
Controller
loiter

des
ff

Filtered pose

EKF

Wind speed (m/s)

Transmitter
stick
positions

fff (ud )

ud

0
Uu

Sensor measurements
0

Fig. 4. Simplifed block diagram of the controllers used. The components

highlighted in red are the additions made compared to the default APM
Copter 3.3 loiter controller. A feedforward pitch angle ff is added to the
output of the loiter controller before being passed to the lower level attitude
controller.

Fig. 5.

10

20

30
t (s)

Uv
40

Uw
50

60

60 s extract from the wind prole generated using TurbSim.

D. Nonlinear Feedforward Controller

B. Baseline Controller
The APM Copter 3.3 ight controller provides a number of
ight modes, each of which uses separate control algorithms.
The loiter mode controller is used as a performance baseline.
A simplied block diagram is shown in Fig. 4. It uses the
position output of the ight controllers EKF to regulate
the quadcopters position. It computes desired thrust, roll,
pitch, and yaw angles that are then transmitted to lowerlevel attitude controllers. The reference pose can be adjusted
by the user using a remote transmitter. It does not make use
of wind sensing information.

A second wind compensating controller was designed.

This controller uses a nonlinear law which does not depend
on a specic linearization point. It is thus expected to
perform over a wider range of wind speeds than the DAC.
It relies on a simple idea: calculating the pitch angle that
would result in static equilibrium of the quadcopter about
the x axis and adding it to the output of the loiter controller.
In a similar fashion to the DAC, the UAVs pitch angle is
assumed to have a negligible effect on the perceived wind
speed. Furthermore, it does not consider vertical and side
wind.
The control law used is:

C. Disturbance Accomodating Controller

DAC [11] has been applied successfully to design controllers for wind turbines. Its objective is to minimize the
effects of wind disturbances on the output of a system. In this
paper a disturbance accommodating controller is designed
with the aim of rejecting front facing wind; vertical wind and
wind coming from the quadcopters sides are not considered
in order to simplify the problem.
Given the linear model dened in (12) and (13), and the
wind model described in (16) and (17), the DAC controller
is implemented using the control law
u = loiter + Gz.

u = loiter + eq

where eq is the tilt angle required to hold the UAS in static

equilibrium, as dened by Eq. 15.
V. S IMULATION R ESULTS
A. Simulation Setup
The equations of motion of the system, motor model, and
drag model described in Section III were implemented in a
simulation model using the Simulink package for MATLAB.
The APM Copter 3.3 loiter controller was replicated and
added to the model. Finally, the DAC and the nonlinear
controller described in Section IV were also integrated.
A wind prole was generated using the TurbSim software,
as shown in Fig. 5. A mean wind speed of 5 m/s along
the negative x-axis was chosen to match the wind speed
achievable on the experimental setup.

(18)

where G is a gain matrix and loiter is the output of the

baseline controller, as shown on Fig. 4. Substituting in (12)
yields
x = Ax + Bloiter + (BG + Bd ) z.

(21)

(19)

The effect of the disturbance on the response is minimized

by setting the term BG + Bd = 0. This can be achieved
by choosing the following gain matrix G:



2 
.
(20)
G = 0 2cf,x udgcos u

B. Loiter Results
The disturbance rejection performance of each of the
controllers was assessed in simulation. Each controller was
subjected to the wind prole shown in Fig. 5 over a period
of 60 s. The quadcopter was at rest at the start of each
simulation.
Fig. 6 shows the complete simulation results and demonstrates that all three controllers remained stable throughout
the simulation. The x-y trace of each controller over the
simulation period, in Fig. 6a, shows that the baseline trace
has a wider spread along the x-axis, which is expected since
it is the dominant wind direction. The DAC and nonlinear

Note that the second element is dependent on the wind

speed used to linearize the system. As a consequence, the
controller is expected to perform differently based on how
close the true wind speed is to the linearization wind speed.
The DAC was designed under the assumption that the
changes in perceived wind speed due to pitching would be
negligible.
698

controller noticeably reduce the x-axis spread but do not

change the spread along the y-axis signicantly. This can be
explained by the absence of wind compensation along the
y-axis.
Fig. 6b to 6g show detailed time responses of the complete
quadcopter pose. It can be observed that the position along
the y- and z-axes is almost identical for all three controllers.
This can be explained by the fact that a quadcopters states
are only weakly coupled; the response along one axis only
has little inuence on that of another. The same observation
can be made of the roll response. On the other hand, the yaw
response performance of the DAC and nonlinear controller is
notably worse than the baseline controllers, with oscillation
magnitudes up to twice as large. The authors believe this
could be due to the inner workings of the APM loiter
controller, but the issue would need to be investigated further.
However, it is worth noting that while the relative decrease
in regulating performance is large, the absolute magnitude
of the oscillations is constrained to less than 0.2 , which is
negligible compared to the roll and pitch responses.
The responses of most interest are the quadcopters position along the x-axis and the associated pitch response,
shown in Fig. 6b and 6f respectively. Both the DAC and
nonlinear controller result in an increase in tracking performance compared to the baseline. After approximately 10 s
both controllers perform almost identically. However, in the
rst ten seconds of the test the DAC overcompensates for the
wind, which results in a large positive displacement of 0.8 m,
whereas the nonlinear controller only peaks at approximately
0.3 m. Looking back to the wind prole in Fig. 5 provides
an explanation; there is a sharp drop in wind speed to 2 m/s
along the x-axis after approximately 6 s. The DAC gain was
designed using a model linearized around an input wind
speed of 5 m/s. The further away from the linearization point
the worse the expected performance. The nonlinear controller
does not suffer from this issue as it is not dependent on any
specic operating wind speed.
The pitch response provides additional insight; it can be
observed that all three controllers result in a largely positive
pitch response throughout the simulation. This is expected as
the quadcopter needs to pitch to provide forward thrust along
the x-axis to compensate for the wind. The pitch response
for the DAC and nonlinear controllers are similar to one
another. Features of the modied controllers can be seen to
match those of the baseline controller. However, the modied
controllers pitch responses lead that of the baseline: the
quadcopter responds to wind disturbances faster by changing
its pitch angle earlier. This increase in responsiveness was
expected due to the DAC and nonlinear controllers use
of feedforward action and proves the effectiveness of the
technique in simulation.
Table II shows a summary of the quadcopters RMS
position errors over the simulation period and reinforces the
previous ndings: the RMS errors along the y- and z-axes
are close to identical for all three controllers. On the other
hand, the nonlinear controller can be seen to yield a threefold decrease in RMS error along the x-axis when compared

y (m)

0.5

(a)

0
Dominant
wind
direction

0.5
1

0.5

0.5

x (m)
(b)

x (m)

1
0
1

(c)

y (m)

0.2
0
0.2

z (m)

0.1

(d)

0.1
4

(e)

( )

2
0
2
4
(f)

( )

20
10
0

(g)

( )

0.2
0
0.2
0

10

20
Baseline

30
t (s)
DAC

40

50

60

Nonlinear

Fig. 6. Simulated station-keeping responses of the quadcopter over a period

of 60 s when subjected to the wind prole shown in Fig. 5 using the baseline,
DAC, and nonlinear controllers. (a) x-y trace of UAV, (b)(g) position and
orientation time responses.

699

Motion capture camera

0.2
0

y (m)

Industrial fan

0.2

Dominant
wind
direction

0.4

Quadcopter

0.2

Fig. 8. Estimated position of the UAV over a period of 10 s when subjected

to a wind of 5 m/s using the baseline APM 3.3 loiter controller.

Patterned mat
Fig. 7.

0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2

x (m)

Photograph of the experimental setup used.

congured to use its optical ow sensor to estimate position

instead. Using dead reckoning instead of absolute positioning
will result in errors growing unbounded over time. As a
consequence, only short tests could be conducted.

to the baseline. The DAC provides a lower 45 % decrease in

RMS error along the x-axis, however much of the difference
can be attributed to the initial overcompensation. Further
investigations in the DACs performance over a range of wind
speeds would be needed due to its dependency on the choice
of linearization point.

B. Baseline Loiter Results

The quadcopter was manually own to its starting position
at a height of 1.5 m using the APM Copter 3.3 stabilize mode.
This mode only regulates the quadcopters roll, pitch, and
yaw in order to provide maximum control to the user. The
quadcopter was then switched to loiter mode using a radio
control transmitter and the fan was turned on. The position
estimated by the quadcopters EKF was recorded from the
moment the fan was turned on to the moment the quadcopter
was taken out of loiter mode. Due to space constraints the
test had to be limited to a 10 s length.
Fig. 8 shows the x-y trace of the quadcopter estimated by
the EKF. The fan was located at (3.5, 0) and the quadcopters
starting position was (0, 0). It can be observed that the
quadcopter initially moves back from its starting position
before starting to oscillate around x = 0.7 m. This is
reected by the RMS errors shown in Table III: the error
along the x-axis is dominant. This is likely due to the
controller failing to handle the initial change in air ow
speed and settling further downstream where air ow speed is
lower. On the other hand, it can be observed that the baseline
controller is better at regulating the y and z errors, with RMS
values 7 and 20 times lower respectively. This is expected
due to the direction of the wind-ow.
A limitation of the results is that the pose was recorded
from the output of the quadcopters EKF. Attempts were
made to try and alleviate the issue by ensuring a constant
heading and good sensor measurement quality, however it
does not necessarily accurately reect the ground truth. Integrating absolute position and heading measurements from

VI. P RELIMINARY E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS

This section covers the preliminary experimental tests performed. The experimental setup is described and an example
of baseline loiter performance is presented and analyzed.
A. Experimental Setup
Fig. 7 shows the experimental setup used. The quadcopter
was own in an enclosed 8 m by 8 m ying area in the
University of Aucklands motion capture laboratory. A large
patterned mat was placed on the oor in order to increase the
quality of the quadcopters optical ow sensor measurements.
The motion capture cameras were not used during the tests
conducted due to the interference between the infrared light
used and the optical ow sensor. An industrial fan was
securely attached to a table at a height of approximately
1.5 m from the ground and 3.5 m away from the quadcopters
starting position in order to provide an air ow. The generated wind speed at the quadcopters starting position was
measured at approximately 5 m/s. The air ow was found to
be relatively directional, as the measured velocity dropped
to 3 m/s when moving 0.5 m away from the starting position
in a direction perpendicular to the ow.
The baseline APM Copter 3.3 was uploaded onto the
quadcopter. Due to the absence of GPS reception it was
TABLE II
RMS ERROR OVER A 60 s LOITER TEST WHEN SUBJECTED TO THE WIND
PROFILE SHOWN IN F IG . 5.

Test

ex,RMS (m)

ey,RMS (m)

ez,RMS (m)

|eRMS | (m)

BL
DAC
NL

0.33
0.18
0.10

0.11
0.11
0.11

0.030
0.030
0.030

0.35
0.21
0.15

TABLE III
RMS ERROR DURING EXPERIMENTAL LOITER TEST.

700

Test

ex,RMS (m)

ey,RMS (m)

ez,RMS (m)

|eRMS | (m)

BL

0.7

0.1

0.03

0.7

an off-board system such as the laboratorys motion capture

system will enable more reliable performance assessment.
On the other hand, the results obtained show that the baseline
controller is capable of compensating for a 5 m/s wind even if
performance is suboptimal, laying the groundwork for testing
the DAC and nonlinear controllers in the future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank M. McCauley, A. Carrell,
S. Jiang, D. How, J. Kutia, and the Controls Group at the
University of Auckland for their assistance.
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VII. C ONCLUSIONS
A simplied wind-inclusive two-dimensional linear model
was created. Based on this mathematical model, two new
controllers were derived for uniaxial wind rejection: a DAC
using a linear control law to minimize wind disturbances and
a nonlinear feedforward controller computing the required
pitch angle to achieve static equilibrium. Both controllers
are modications of the existing APM 3.3 loiter controller.
The DAC was shown in a case study to decrease the RMS
position error of the UAV along the compensated axis by
66 % compared to the baseline. The nonlinear controller was
similarly shown to result in a decrease of 45 %. However,
the DAC was found to be more affected by changes in wind
speed due to its linear nature. The feasibility of rejecting a
5 m/s wind was proven by a sample experimental test with
the baseline controller.
The performance of the DAC and nonlinear controllers
when subjected to a large range of input wind speeds will
be assessed. Furthermore, the experimental UAV will be
upgraded to use precise pose measurements from a motion
capture system. This will enable more thorough physical
experiments. In order for the designed controllers to be
implemented, the quality of wind measurements taken by the
onboard pitot tube will need to be assessed. Subsequently, the
DAC and nonlinear controller will be implemented and tuned
on the system. Finally, their wind rejection performance will
be tested experimentally using an industrial fan.

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