Robotics meets Fluid Dynamics: A Characterization of the Induced Airflow around a Quadrotor
<|reference_start|>Robotics meets Fluid Dynamics: A Characterization of the Induced Airflow around a Quadrotor: The widespread adoption of quadrotors for diverse applications, from agriculture to public safety, necessitates an understanding of the aerodynamic disturbances they create. This paper introduces a computationally lightweight model for estimating the time-averaged magnitude of the induced flow below quadrotors in hover. Unlike related approaches that rely on expensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations or time-consuming empirical measurements, our method leverages classical theory from turbulent flows. By analyzing over 9 hours of flight data from drones of varying sizes within a large motion capture system, we show that the combined flow from all propellers of the drone is well-approximated by a turbulent jet. Through the use of a novel normalization and scaling, we have developed and experimentally validated a unified model that describes the mean velocity field of the induced flow for different drone sizes. The model accurately describes the far-field airflow in a very large volume below the drone which is difficult to simulate in CFD. Our model, which requires only the drone's mass, propeller size, and drone size for calculations, offers a practical tool for dynamic planning in multi-agent scenarios, ensuring safer operations near humans and optimizing sensor placements.<|reference_end|>
@article{bauersfeld2024robotics,
    title={Robotics meets Fluid Dynamics: A Characterization of the Induced Airflow
  below a Quadrotor as a Turbulent Jet},
    author={Leonard Bauersfeld, Koen Muller, Dominic Ziegler, Filippo Coletti,
  Davide Scaramuzza},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.13321},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.13321},
    primaryClass={cs.RO}
}