If an observation UAV only launches when the forecast wind is below a limit, how much does forecast error bring failures back, and what does it cost in scrubbed missions?

research/osrobot-uavnogo

If an observation UAV launches only when the forecast wind is under a limit, how much does forecast error bring failures back? A perfect forecast turns every failure into a scrub (fixed wing, wind ~ N(5, 4) m/s: 4.6% scrubbed at the 95th-percentile limit); a 2 m/s error gives 6.8% failures at the median limit but 1.1% at the 95th. Stylised, one steady wind per mission.

5 tests

What it found

A stdlib extension of osrobot-uavgust sizes the airframe for a launch limit wind and launches only if the forecast of the wind is at most that limit, with a normal forecast error (exact discretisation, no sampling noise). With a perfect forecast every failure becomes a scrub (fixed wing, wind ~ N(5, 4) m/s: 48% scrubbed at the median limit, 4.6% at the 95th percentile, 1.274 to 1.313 kg). A 2 m/s forecast error brings the failure rate to 6.8% at the median limit but only 1.1% at the 95th-percentile limit. Stylised: one steady wind per mission, assumed constants, normal forecast error, no cost put on a scrub.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/osrobot-uavnogo: fail_vs_forecast_error — osrobot-uavnogo/experiments/fail_vs_forecast_error.svg, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.