GustPilot: A Hierarchical DRL-INDI Framework for Wind-Resilient Quadrotor Navigation

Abstract

Wind disturbances remain a key barrier to reliable autonomous navigation for lightweight quadrotors, where the rapidly varying airflow can destabilize both planning and tracking. This paper introduces GustPilot, a hierarchical wind-resilient navigation stack in which a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policy generates inertial-frame velocity reference for gate traversal. At the same time, a geometric Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI) controller provides low-level tracking with fast residual disturbance rejection. The INDI layer achieves this by providing incremental feedback on both specific linear acceleration and angular acceleration rate, using onboard sensor measurements to reject wind disturbances rapidly. Robustness is obtained through a two-level strategy, wind-aware planning learned via fan-jet domain randomization during training, and rapid execution-time disturbance rejection by the INDI tracking controller. We evaluate GustPilot in real flights on a 50g quad-copter platform against a DRL-PID baseline across four scenarios ranging from no-wind to fully dynamic conditions with a moving gate and a moving disturbance source. Despite being trained only in a minimal single-gate and single-fan setup, the policy generalizes to significantly more complex environments (up to six gates and four fans) without retraining. Across 80 experiments, DRL-INDI achieves a 94.7% versus 55.0% for DRL-PID as average Overall Success Rate (OSR), reduces tracking RMSE up to 50%, and sustains speeds up to 1.34 m/s under wind disturbances up to 3.5 m/s. These results demonstrate that combining DRL-based velocity planning with structured INDI disturbance rejection provides a practical and generalizable approach to wind-resilient autonomous flight navigation.