Quadrotor Trajectory Tracking Under Multimodal Wind Disturbances via History-Conditioned Hierarchical Distributionally Robust Reinforcement Learning
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Multimodal wind disturbances complicate quadrotor trajectory tracking through partial observability and shifts in disturbance distributions. To address these challenges, this study develops hierarchically structured distributionally robust proximal policy optimization (HSDR-PPO), integrating observation history with separate Kullback–Leibler constraints on wind-class probabilities and within-class disturbance distributions. The resulting adversarial probabilities weight policy updates while rollout collection maintains fixed candidate coverage, enabling history-conditioned robust control without wind measurements or scenario labels. Simulations using a Crazyflie 2X model with prescribed external forces cover five training seeds and eight test groups. HSDR-PPO achieves the lowest mean episode cost and mean physical failure rate, reducing cost by 13.0–19.2% relative to the best baseline in each group. Under intensity-matched colored-disturbance shifts, worst-decile cost decreases by 32.9% relative to Joint-KL PPO. Ablations support contributions from observation history and hierarchical reweighting, while evaluations under unseen chirps, a figure-eight reference, and an extended task duration demonstrate transfer without retraining. A policy trained in simulation configured for the experimental platform is subsequently deployed on a physical quadrotor, achieving a three-dimensional position root mean square error of 0.071 m in a representative 48 s outdoor flight. These results demonstrate improved robustness under the evaluated simulation conditions and successful deployment for outdoor trajectory tracking.
Source: Drones
Authors: Junlin Li, Yang Zhang, Jie Yi, Conglin Chen, Tao Ma, Hao Liu
Institution: Southeast University
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,137
OpenAlex ID: W7225812850
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