Modelling & Simulation Tool

Modelling and Simulation, Blender, Drone,physics simulation, weather effects

The Modelling and Simulation Tool provides a convenient system for generating high-fidelity synthetic air-operations datasets including environment selection, drone physics simulation and weather effects (e.g., wind, fog). The Tool utilizes 3D modelling environments, allows trajectory edition or waypoint selection, implementation of drone physics behaviour and supports multiple sensor configurations such as monocular or stereoscopic camera systems.

This tool uses Blender. It is a 3D open-source modelling and rendering engine applied for synthetic dataset generation. It supports loading of several data formats, supports animations, simulations and it is highly configurable. One of the advantages is the ability to render photorealistic images using Cycles render. Blender supports rendering into multiple cameras as well as configuring the parameters of cameras such as focal length or radial distortion. Cameras are connected to the 3D model of the UAV. After that, the centre of mass is animated in such a way as to simulate a fly-through of the city. The Blender provides tools for precise trajectory modelling and the trajectory can be exported to the external file using scripts. The exported trajectory data of the generated synthetic dataset is important for the evaluation of the accuracy of the trajectory estimation algorithm which uses the generated images as an input and the exported trajectory as a ground truth.