Dynamic model used in simulation

[MohammadAlawi]

Hello,

First of all, thank you for the great work on this simulator, it has been incredibly useful for my research. I’m currently trying to understand the underlying drone dynamics implemented in gym-pybullet-drones, particularly how they are mathematically modeled.

• Is there a specific mathematical or differential equation model (e.g., Newton-Euler, Lagrangian) that the drone dynamics in this simulator are based on? And how to access it.

• Are there any references or documentation (papers, models) that describe the assumptions and equations behind the drone physics?

[JacopoPan]

Hi @MohammadAlawi

the one of the main rationale of this project was to use a generic physics engine (Bullet in this case) so here the motors actuation is applied as a wrench to the drone using PyBullet. If you want to modify how that works (besides the calls to the Bullet backend themselves), you'd need to re-build https://github.com/bulletphysics/bullet3

For what you are trying to do, I believe you'd be better off starting from https://github.com/utiasDSL/safe-control-gym (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06325) which does include explicit dynamics equations and MPC formulations