Drone Physics Simulation

Key Technologies: Unreal Engine 5, C++, Unreal Engine Blueprints, Custom Unreal Engine Classes

The Challenge

Our client needed to develop a simple but robust physics-based simulation of drone flight with flexible control interfaces. Additionally, heavy emphasis was placed on future maintainability and expandability as well as the parametrization of key physical properties of the drone model to enable drop-in support for changing the drone body being simulated.

The Solution

Adinkra developed and tuned a simplified physics based simulation of a drone’s flight characteristics within Unreal Engine 5 utilizing custom C++ classes and Unreal’s API along with Feedback control loops to emulate the work generally done by onboard flight controllers. This resulted in realistic flight characteristics which could be readily modified and influenced parametrically to achieve the client’s goals.

The Impact

Our solution was able to be successfully implemented across existing Unreal Engine 5 environments and provided an extremely lightweight and reasonably realistic simulation of drone flight characteristics, useful for a wide variety of applications from drone flight training to practicing flying in different scenarios and environments.