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Rocket Simulator Project Home

Goal: To create a flexible and realistic simulated environment that will enable the testing of current and future intelligent avionics systems for PSAS rockets.

Project Notes

• Rocket simulator 3D visualization (Open GL/SDL)
• Basic physics are in place for 3D flight. Nodes and Sensors are nearly ported from RocketSim. Next phase is to beef up the physics model and pull model description from a config file. -- ?DavidAllen June 27, 2005
• Creating the new rocket model physics. The new model will support a full 3D FlightRepresentation. -- ?DavidAllen April 15, 2005
• Core system rewrite is done. Project is called RocketDes. Changes include splitting source code into a directory structure, a new discrete event simulation system, greatly expanded configuration support including command line argument parsing, improved exception handling, and other additions. The rocket model code has not yet been ported to this simulator. -- ?DavidAllen April 8, 2005
• Rewriting simulator as a discrete event simulator, converting from time slice model. -- ?DavidAllen January 20, 2005
• Final project write-up FinalProjectWriteup.txt -- ?DavidAllen December 17, 2004
• Project prospectus Prospectus.txt -- ?DavidAllen November 15, 2004

Project Resources

• Project Source Code Here

• World Modeling

  • A Simple equation relating atmospheric pressure to altitude. Derived from the ICAO standard atmosphere model: PressureAltitude Derived.pdf
  • Air Density and Density Altitude Calculations

• Physics and Math

  • MathWorld: Probably the best general purpose math reference site around.
  • ScienceWorld: Physics: Mechanics: From Eric Weisstein's World of Science.
  • EuclideanSpace - building a 3D world: A remarkable broad set of information, although the editing and layout take some getting used to.
  • Game Physics: Physics in 3D: A quick summary of game physics.
  • Computer Animation: A course taught by Steve Rotenberg at UCSD, Winter 2005.
  • A presentation from this class that compares representations of orientation and shows why quaternions are a good method: OrientationQuaternions.ppt
  • Quaternions: An Introduction To Representing Rotations In Quaternion Arithmetic
  • Wikipedia: Quaternions: Even more detail on quaternions.
  • SPACE/MATH - Constants and Equations for Calculations

• Example Source Code

  • Graphics related C++ code created by Eric Paquette.

• Tim B. talks about RocketSimPhysics

Other Projects

• Rogers' Aeroscience ALT4 is the simulator PSAS is currently using. It is one of several simulators listed at thrustcurve.org.
• The RocketWorkbench project is working on various rocket support software, including the rockflight/librockflight rocket simulation software.
• The rocket workbench project at sourceforge.