Make/find a Gazebo URDF for a plane

[aaeagal]

Things to get done by Wednesday, March 8th

• [X] Download Gazebo
• [ ] Get a URDF of a aeroplane
• [ ] Consider how we detect collisions

[iSkytran]

For collisions, we can detect the forces exerted on the linkages to determine at what force we can consider the plane as crashed.

[aaeagal]

Options

1. We could use PX4, they have a fixed wing plane model: https://docs.px4.io/v1.12/en/simulation/gazebo_vehicles.html
2. Here's an interesting plug-in that can simulate aerodynamic robots: https://classic.gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=aerodynamics&cat=physics
3. ROSplane: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10053368
4. More ROSplane: https://github.com/byu-magicc/rosplane

[aaeagal]

Now MuJoCo.

Two Candidates for URDF:

1. https://github.com/ethz-asl/rotors_simulator/tree/master/rotors_description/urdf
2. https://github.com/byu-magicc/rosplane

[iSkytran]

Now that we are using the Clearpath Jackal, the URDFs we will be using can be found here: https://github.com/jackal/jackal/tree/foxy-devel/jackal_description

One thing of note is that the current URDF for the Jackal doesn't have any way to detect collisions, so there's no way to know if we need to reset the simulation or not and what rewards to give. We'll need to modify the URDF/xacro to have something detect collisions. https://classic.gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=ros_gzplugins#Bumper

[iSkytran]

I believe that this issue can be closed as a custom URDF has been merged in with PR #5.