We are trying to augment our existing large drone (quadcopter) system with a Trisonica-Mini Weather Sensor (or something similar), to collect high fidelity/resolution weather data. In particular wind speed and direction.
I’ve learned that you can get wind speed/direction estimation from the EKF (assuming it’s finely tuned with drag coefficients). But I was unable to find any resources showing how I can test/measure the resolution or fidelity of wind estimations of any given EKF.
Since this wind data will be used for scientific purposes, I want to be able to quantify it’s accuracy. Which is why I’m leaning towards mounting an independent
weather station such that it’s isolated from the turbulent air created by the propellors, but I’m at a loss.
If anyone has expertise with collecting wind speed/direction with very high accuracy and precision on UAVs, I’d love to pick your brain! Any information helps!
Hi! I’m also working on integrating a TriSonica Mini with a Pixhawk and trying to establish communication between them. I’m very interested in your approach. If you’ve made any progress on this, I’d really appreciate it if you could share your experience.
Thanks in advance!
EKF wind is mainly for control, not research accuracy — it’s hard to quantify fidelity. For scientific data you’ll need a dedicated sensor (e.g. Trisonica) placed outside prop wash, like on a boom or mast. That’s the only way to get reliable measurements.
I would be happy to held out if you need, sounds like you want to connect a TriSonica Mini directly to a px4 flight controller?
Our project involved using the TriSonica Mini as a data collection for scientific purposes. We made a custom mount for our DJI Matrice 300 RTK. Our setup uses a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and DJI’s eport dev board to save TriSonica weather data and RTK position data to the Pi. r
It sounds like you possibly want to inform your flight controller of wind speed? I’m not sure if it’s possible to hook the sensor directly to flight controller without writing code to handle serial communication (though I would be willing to give it a try!). But if you just need to log data with a small companion computer I can give you the python code I’m currently using to read TriSonica Data.
Do you have the Pole Mount or Simple TriSonica version?
Thanks for the response, I reached out to several other experts and they essentially confirmed the same thing.
I’m considering trying to make a custom build with RTK GPS and perhaps some additional camera/sensors to see how finely I can tune the estimator, to see if I can pull out any wind data. Let me know if you have any suggestions or advice for this project!
Cool project idea! If you go that route, best thing is log everything (RTK, camera, IMU) and compare against your independent weather sensor — that way you’ll know how much “real” wind signal you can extract from the estimator. Also watch placement of extra sensors so they’re out of the prop wash.
