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.

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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

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article

WAGRL: A Wind Adaptive Guidance Framework for Uncertainty-Aware UAV Trajectory Control

Bodi Ma, Sili Yang, Guozhu Zhi, Kelin Zhong et al.
Drones
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
article

WAGRL: A Wind Adaptive Guidance Framework for Uncertainty-Aware UAV Trajectory Control

Bodi Ma, Sili Yang, Guozhu Zhi, Kelin Zhong, Yong Tang
article en

Abstract

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.

DronesVol. 10(10)
Northwestern Polytechnical University (CN), Chang'an University (CN)
National Natural Science Foundation of China, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
Openalex Percentile: Top 13%
Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
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