WESPR: Wind-adaptive Energy-Efficient Safe Perception & Planning for Robust Flight with Quadrotors

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Habib, Khuzema, Manjunath, Pranav Deshakulkarni, Torshizi, Kasra, Williams, Troi, Tokekar, Pratap
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Habib, Khuzema
Manjunath, Pranav Deshakulkarni
Torshizi, Kasra
Williams, Troi
Tokekar, Pratap
author_facet Habib, Khuzema
Manjunath, Pranav Deshakulkarni
Torshizi, Kasra
Williams, Troi
Tokekar, Pratap
contents Local wind conditions strongly influence drone performance: headwinds increase flight time, crosswinds and wind shear hinder agility in cluttered spaces, while tailwinds reduce travel time. Although adaptive controllers can mitigate turbulence, they remain unaware of the surrounding geometry that generates it, preventing proactive avoidance. Existing methods that model how wind interacts with the environment typically rely on computationally expensive fluid dynamics simulations, limiting real-time adaptation to new environments and conditions. To bridge this gap, we present WESPR, a fast framework that predicts how environmental geometry affects local wind conditions, enabling proactive path planning and control adaptation. Our lightweight pipeline integrates geometric perception and local weather data to estimate wind fields, compute cost-efficient paths, and adjust control strategies-all within 10 seconds. We validate WESPR on a Crazyflie drone navigating turbulent obstacle courses. Our results show a 12.5-58.7% reduction in maximum trajectory deviation and a 24.6% improvement in stability compared to a wind-agnostic adaptive controller.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_09194
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WESPR: Wind-adaptive Energy-Efficient Safe Perception & Planning for Robust Flight with Quadrotors
Habib, Khuzema
Manjunath, Pranav Deshakulkarni
Torshizi, Kasra
Williams, Troi
Tokekar, Pratap
Robotics
Local wind conditions strongly influence drone performance: headwinds increase flight time, crosswinds and wind shear hinder agility in cluttered spaces, while tailwinds reduce travel time. Although adaptive controllers can mitigate turbulence, they remain unaware of the surrounding geometry that generates it, preventing proactive avoidance. Existing methods that model how wind interacts with the environment typically rely on computationally expensive fluid dynamics simulations, limiting real-time adaptation to new environments and conditions. To bridge this gap, we present WESPR, a fast framework that predicts how environmental geometry affects local wind conditions, enabling proactive path planning and control adaptation. Our lightweight pipeline integrates geometric perception and local weather data to estimate wind fields, compute cost-efficient paths, and adjust control strategies-all within 10 seconds. We validate WESPR on a Crazyflie drone navigating turbulent obstacle courses. Our results show a 12.5-58.7% reduction in maximum trajectory deviation and a 24.6% improvement in stability compared to a wind-agnostic adaptive controller.
title WESPR: Wind-adaptive Energy-Efficient Safe Perception & Planning for Robust Flight with Quadrotors
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09194