Renewed Interest

About when I was starting to get back into doing the Quadrotor Simulator, my life got busy. Things have calmed down a little bit, and I'm working on it again. This time, I want to make a full blown open source RC Flight simulator.

Hopefully using an active 3d engine and other open source packages I can stave off stagnation, especially when it comes to graphics.

For a 3d engine, I will be using Ogre3d. Why? Ogre3d is an very active project at this time, and is even being used in commercial games. Additionally, Ogre3d is cross platform. Lastly, Ogre3d has an Ubuntu PPA for up to date packages.


As a side note, not that I think it will come up, don't use the paypal button. It is broken at this time...

The goals

This is a work in progress and will be edited often...

Objective

Create an enjoyable and accurate simulation for flying quadrotors and other similar aircraft both autonomously and manually.

Requirements

1. Accurate physics simulation
1. Collision Detection
2. Random winds and perturbations
3. Forces and torques calculation
4. Adjustable aircraft models, including motor, props, battery, and geometries
2. Allow custom autopilot to be implemented and included
3. Ability to interface with quadrotor via sockets to allow for hardware in loop simulation
4. Rich immersive and customizable environments
1. Different worlds, including indoor and outdoor
2. Interactive objects
5. Adjustable IMU model
1. Adjustable Gyro and Accel models
2. Gausian noise
3. Temperature drift

The beginning

For my senior project in college, I worked on a quadrotor or quadcopter or whatever name it may go by.  Afterwards, I took a class on computer graphics and wrote a simple quadrotor simulator using OpenGL, SDL, and Blender.

The plan is to make this into a full blown game using several open source packages for physics simulation and more.

I am including a

button so that if anyone wishes, they can donate to my project and help me produce a quality game that is Linux compatible.  My goal is for this game to also be a learning experience for those experimenting with quadrotors, as well as becoming a fun polished game for linux.