Midterm: High Fidelity UAV Simulation Using Unreal Engine with specular reflections

As part of the Open Source Autonomous Vehicle Controller my proposal under the mentorship of Aaron Hunter and Carlos Espinosa aims to Develop a Unreal Engine based simulator for testing. The simulator will be using Unreal Engine for the physics and visualization.

What we have done so far

• We found that we can use Unreal Engine as a physics simulator and co-simulate with Simulink using the tools provided by MathWorks.
• Simulated a example provided by MathWorks but i wasn’t getting the expected behaviour and there were very few resource available.
• So we decided with using Gazebo and ROS for simulation instead of Unreal Engine and Simulink for the example of a balancing bot which had been designed in Solidworks.
• For using Gazebo, i had converted the Solidworks model into an URDF and imported it into Gazebo.

Future Work

Currently, i am working on using Gazebo and ROS for controling a balancing bot using a PID control algorithm. Afterwards document the process of import a model into Gazebo for testing a control algorithm.