WAGRL: A Wind Adaptive Guidance Framework for Uncertainty-Aware UAV Trajectory Control
To address the challenges of wind-induced uncertainty, decision inconsistency, and safety risks in quadrotor trajectory tracking, this study presents a Wind Adaptive Guidance Reinforcement Learning (WAGRL) framework. Unlike conventional controllers relying on fixed aerodynamic models, WAGRL integrates ensemble-based policy learning with uncertainty-guided reinforcement learning to adaptively manage diverse wind conditions. A set of digital expert policies is trained to capture heterogeneous wind-response strategies, and an ensemble-based estimation mechanism quantifies epistemic uncertainty for robust action selection. An entropy-driven adaptive intervention module monitors real-time decision confidence and activates expert guidance when uncertainty exceeds adaptive thresholds. To validate the proposed framework, extensive simulations are conducted under both nominal and wind-disturbed settings, covering square-loop tracking, geometric path following, and gust rejection scenarios. The results show that WAGRL achieves faster convergence, enhanced trajectory accuracy, and smoother attitude responses. Real-world flight tests further confirm that WAGRL maintains stable and reliable performance under outdoor wind disturbances, demonstrating its potential for safe and adaptive UAV control in complex aerial environments.
Authors
- Bodi Ma (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3777-4531)
- Sili Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-6821-4673)
- Guozhu Zhi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-9926-1619)
- Kelin Zhong
- Yong Tang
Institutions
- Northwestern Polytechnical University (CN)
- Chang'an University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Drones
- Published
- 2026-10-16
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/drones10100780
- Primary Topic
- Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- China Postdoctoral Science Foundation
- Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities