Novel wind sensor for robotic chemical plume tracking

Abstract

Wind sensors are widely used to measure wind speed and direction for weather forecasting or for other purposes including measuring wind flow of wind tunnel in a laboratory. Due to its wide applications, many wind sensors are commercially available off-the-shelf. This study concerns wind direction and speed sensing for robotic chemical plume tracking studies and applications. Therefore, it is highly demanded to have a wind sensor that has a small size, light weight and less power consumption. In this paper, the design of the wind sensor down to the post-processing of the sensor reading data are presented. The result shows that the wind sensor performance is satisfactory and can be implemented for robotic chemical plume tracking study to provide proper wind speed and direction information.