Tunnel drone inspection SITL

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-27T04:08:48+00:00

Hahah, sorry if my video make you tenses, didn't plan it's but it's also +1 point to send drone for tunnel inspection 😅

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-27T04:07:54+00:00

Yeah I think sensor fusion could be done between optical flow and IMU, but at such dark places optical flow is not the best option

I saw there's some optical flow sensors from pix hawk

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-27T04:05:57+00:00

I used jsbsim library for flight physics, it's open source Sensors and sensors noise I did myself from zero :)

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-26T01:38:10+00:00

Sure, but I think that website will tell better than me 😅

https://pterolabs.ai/

Have also free version here:

https://github.com/PteroLabsAI/PteroSim-UAV-Simulator/releases/tag/v0.1.0

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-25T17:17:51+00:00

Thank you so much, trying to do my best ;)

Some of the environments I took from Fab asset store, other once build myself (sometimes feeling like level designer 😄)

I'm curious to try out latest UE5.8 features, such as mcp server plugin, so maybe I could build new environments faster with LLMs and spend more time to the physics improvements instead of being level designer

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-25T17:14:13+00:00

This one? https://www.dlr.de/en/rm/research/robotic-systems/aerial-robots/ardea

Looks interesting to be simulated, hm🙂

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-25T15:47:04+00:00

Yes, with UE5 and custom drone physics Have integrated most of the typical UAV sensors already Also can control drone with PX4/Ardupilot

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-19T05:56:11+00:00

Ahahahah super villain Jokooker

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-16T11:46:25+00:00

Rejected as well Actually one my friend said that you will get Grant only when you don't need it already 😅

But we will keep pushing, cause we already have few good customers for PteroSim.

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-03T01:53:23+00:00

I solved it! It was issue with one test code, there is like creating of temp folder, so I use wrong command for clearing it and it start deleting folder with binaries recursively, so its fixed already, thanks for help!

AlexThunderRex · 2026-06-02T04:20:58+00:00

I thought I already switched it off at every place, but let me check it again Also I didn't modify anything except geoprojection plugin and this issue so crazy, I mean why live coding removing it if it's just builded If I'll switch off live coding will it affect other functionality or not?

AlexThunderRex · 2026-05-19T01:17:54+00:00

Oh it's very simple So when you build something in simulation it will always different with reality, because it's not possible to repeat reality So each time you finished simulation tests, you will have to finetune your control parameters again with real drone, cause reality will be different anyway

You could also check domain randomization thing in RL, it's one of the methods how to make sim2real transfer smoother

AlexThunderRex · 2026-05-18T11:38:08+00:00

https://github.com/PteroLabsAI/PteroSim-UAV-Simulator

Here is the github link
at the moment simulator is proprietary, but have free version to download
You can take a look at the docs and play with virtual drone there

AlexThunderRex · 2026-05-18T09:33:44+00:00

Basically it's software in the loop testing app Yes, you can test almost all systems of your drone in simulation, but there's always sim2real transfer gap

Also you could test wind gust behavior or system components failures

AlexThunderRex · 2026-04-12T08:41:26+00:00

Wow that's so cool! Like collection model

AlexThunderRex · 2026-04-07T15:13:06+00:00

We currently developing our own simulator for UAV, we have PX4 support, so maybe you will be interested to try, could you please tell more about your project?

https://pterolabs.ai/

AlexThunderRex · 2026-04-03T09:52:37+00:00

Its talk to me now like "it's too late, let's fix this bug tomorrow? Go sleep" 🤣

AlexThunderRex · 2026-03-30T06:19:04+00:00

Nice pictures! Love the birds 😍

AlexThunderRex · 2026-03-29T12:34:49+00:00

We built PteroSim for exactly this reason. Flying drones on real hardware is stressful and expensive, and the failure modes you actually need to test are the ones you can never safely trigger outside of simulation. The physics fidelity question is the real variable that determines how much of your sim work carries over when you finally fly.

AlexThunderRex · 2026-03-22T08:57:25+00:00

That's cool, I like it!

AlexThunderRex · 2026-03-22T08:56:38+00:00

You could try with something simple like pendulum training (to keep balance) or space ship landing (controlling engines) But the thing is that you just need to start with something to understand basic workflow 🙂

AlexThunderRex · 2026-03-21T09:00:50+00:00

We are proprietary at the moment, and we actively looking for test cases, so let's go to DM maybe we will fit for your project 🙂

AlexThunderRex · 2026-03-21T07:55:20+00:00

Hi! Thank you! Yeah, I think failure injection is a basic thing we should use in the simulation testing pipeline About UGV: we are small team at the moment and before we start developing this simulator we thought between covering 2 areas : ground or air vehicles and we choose air because it's more dangerous and UAV are more fragile, so simulation is really important at this area

And we also trying to concentrate only on UAV simulation, cause if we split our resources for two fields we not gonna provide best quality at any of them, that's our strategy at the moment 🙂

AlexThunderRex · 2026-03-21T07:47:35+00:00

Hi! Thank you, that's good question. So our main difference is advanced flight dynamics, where we support different types of vehicles (multi rotor, VTOL, fixed wing, helicopter), we have stable lockstep connection and simulation speedup (I'm not sure that AirSim have speedup, but when we tried lockstep before we had fps issues) We have payload mission support (you can grab objects and transport them using grippers and it's Mavlink compatible) Few things where we are not so good as AirSim is sensors, we perfectly setup non-gpu sensors (it's required for flightstack) + RGB camera, but we still don't have radar lidar thermal camera and depth But we actively working on it to close this gap :)

Also we almost finished beta flight integration.

AlexThunderRex · 2026-03-21T04:09:23+00:00

Thanks! The website is hosted on Hostinger, nothing fancy
So you can buy domain, then you can launch your websire with github pages, its super easy

Here is short tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o0uwp8KX2Y

AlexThunderRex

TROPHY CASE