Orateur
Description
Paragliding is a relatively young adventure sport, popularized in the early 1980s, that involves flying lightweight, free-flying, foot-launched glider aircraft without a rigid primary structure. This design inherently leads to instability, particularly during unsteady phases of flight such as the spiral descent. A spiral descent is characterized by the helical trajectory of both the pilot and the wing around a shared axis. The maneuver poses unique dangers; even without brake input, the pilot can remain trapped in a continuous spiral, descending at approximately 20 m/s. Measuring the position and orientation of a paraglider during such flight phases raises significant challenges regarding GPS precision and robustness against centrifugal acceleration. This study details how centimeter-level precision GPS and inertial measurement units (IMUs), combined with video recordings and sensor fusion techniques, enable the accurate reconstruction of the paraglider's trajectory and attitude during a spiral descent. The methodology we present will be broadly applicable to large scale in-vivo measurements of complex unsteady dynamics.