Disturbance-Aware Hybrid Learning for Robust and Adaptive UAV Flight in Extreme Winds

Disturbance-Aware Hybrid Learning for Robust and Adaptive UAV Flight in Extreme Winds

Huidong Liu, Jiarui Dou, Jiangshan Ai, Enwen Hu, Xianlei Long, Mingyan Li, Chao Chen, Fuqiang Gu

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI and Robotics. Pages 7592-7600. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2026/844

Safe and precise maneuvering of quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in high-speed wind environments remains a critical challenge. Wind disturbances are nonlinear, time-varying, and difficult to model, causing traditional controllers to struggle with perception and compensation, especially under unseen wind distributions. To address these limitations, we introduce WA-TD3, a data-driven control framework that enables real-time wind disturbance perception and adaptive compensation without dedicated wind sensors. WA-TD3 employs a deep residual network to extract wind characteristics from temporal patterns in state deviations, forming a dynamics residual-driven perception mechanism that implicitly models and compensates for unknown winds. This residual is integrated into a perception-augmented reinforcement learning architecture, providing the policy with enhanced state information for proactive disturbance-aware control. Extensive experiments on complex trajectories under varying wind intensities demonstrate that WA-TD3 consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving over 62% improvement in tracking accuracy under strong winds.
Keywords:
AIR: Robot control, planning, and execution with guarantees
Robot control, planning, and execution with guarantees: Safe and robust control under uncertainty
Safety, trustworthiness, generalizability, and evaluation: Theoretical and algorithmic guarantees on safety, robustness, and out-of-distribution generalization