I imported a drone from the extension called Pegasus. But honestly I have no idea how ISAAC sim simulates this drone. Specifically, Some of the properties are beyond my knowledge, and I don’t understand how the simulation works.
Firstly, there is a set of property named “UV”, is this a built-in tool for unmaned verhicles? What does “UVW” mean? Where can I find the docs for those properties?
Secondly, I noticed that isaac sim can’t simulate air when I found the drone will still drop even if I let the rotors run rapidly. Is there a way to simulate air (and wind if possible) so that I cound get more accurate simulation results?
Thirdly, how to freely modify the 3D model of this drone (and possibly other robots)? For example, if I may want to dig a hole on the surface to test the impact of this action, how to make it happen. Note my focus is on the collider because I only seek to collect physical data at this stage. And I also need the simulator to calculate the new center of mass efficiently. Is there an advanced tutorial to teach me those topics?
Lastly, how to randomly generate terrians for robot testing. In the AnyMal example, the surface of the ground is a composition of regular boxes, which is obviously unrealistic in real world. How to generate a super realistic ground surface with ISAAC SIM?
Thanks, but I had read this document before I posted the question. That’s where I got this drone in the simulation.
The problem of this extension is, it doesn’t work in win 10. The major problem is that ROS2 and ISAAC SIM are compiled under different versions of python. I noticed there is forum suggesting to compile ROS2 manually by ourselves, but it’s unrealistic in my case, because the official guide is buggy and I have no C++ compiling experience to fix them. Do you have any solution to the problem?
“UV” / “UVW” properties: These are standard USD texture coordinate attributes (primvars:st), not drone-specific. “UVW” refers to texture mapping coordinates — they control how textures wrap around the mesh geometry. See the USD
documentation on primvars (USD Terms and Concepts — Universal Scene Description 26.03 documentation).
Air/aerodynamics simulation: Isaac Sim uses PhysX for rigid body physics, which does not simulate aerodynamic forces (lift, drag, wind) natively. Pegasus Simulator applies thrust forces to the drone body programmatically via Python — it’s
not simulating airflow. If the drone drops with rotors spinning, the thrust force calculation in the Pegasus backend may not be configured correctly. Check the Pegasus vehicle dynamics parameters
(Pegasus Simulator — Pegasus Simulator documentation). For wind, you’d need to add custom force vectors to the rigid body each timestep.
Modifying 3D models / colliders: Use the Isaac Sim GUI physics tools (Physics > Collision Mesh) or edit the mesh in an external tool (Blender) and re-import. Center of mass is auto-computed by PhysX from the collision mesh — modify the
collision geometry and it updates automatically.
Realistic terrain generation: Isaac Sim supports terrain generation through omni.isaac.lab (Redirecting to the latest Isaac Lab documentation) (formerly Orbit) which has configurable terrain generators (heightmap-based, procedural rough terrain). See
the Isaac Lab terrain tutorial. The box-based terrain in AnyMal is intentional for RL training, not a limitation.
For Pegasus-specific issues (especially the Windows/ROS2 Python version mismatch), please use the Pegasus GitHub discussions (PegasusSimulator · Discussions · GitHub). Closing this topic as the questions have been
addressed.
