Quadrotor Flight Simulation in a CFD-generated Urban Wind Field

This paper presents a software pipeline that enables simulating a quadrotor’s flight in realistic urban wind fields where complex wind phenomena are common and have significant impact on vehicle dynamics. The pipeline integrates the OpenStreetMap database for obtaining real-world building geometry, the OpenFOAM computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver for computing a three-dimensional, steady, wind field, the Gazebo robotics simulation environment, and the PX4 software-in-the-loop autopilot. A 3D wind plugin is developed to interpolate a pre-computed CFD wind field at runtime during the simulation. The approach is demonstrated by comparing the flight performance of a quadrotor flying over a university campus environment with and without the wind field.