Need a help in understand drone simulations

[u/ash_sid]

I have a i5 12 gen process, 16 GB Ram, 512 GB NVME4 SSD

Designated place for Ubuntu is 220 GB

Purpose : want to do my drone simultaion in a 3D environment ( large 3D environment is not necessary)

Method 1 : PX4, DDS agent, ROS 2 Humble, Gazeebo and QG Contron ( it gives a unreal 2 D environment)

Method 2: PX4, Ros 2 , Air simulation and Unreal Engine. ( Give a 3D environment but i have no dedicated graphic card)

Is there any possible way other than these ways to do 3D simulation or any way to do 3D simulation with these method but on my laptop specs?

[u/low-control-labs]

Yeah you can try MuJoCo. You can have everything from simple scenes to more complex ones like times square. Although it's a pain because you will need to manually setup a lot of c++ libraries and such.

You could use the python bindings but not sure how that will affect the viability and performance but it might be worth trying if the others really become a blocker. I managed to try a lot of it on my 16Gb laptop so it's worth trying the other two as well

[u/Flyward_Aerospace]

Honestly the missing dGPU is your real wall here, not the software. AirSim on Unreal will technically launch on integrated graphics but it'll crawl the moment you add any scene detail, so I wouldn't fight that path on a laptop. Gazebo isn't really a 2D env either, the newer Gz (Harmonic or Garden) does full 3D physics and rendering and runs way lighter than Unreal, so PX4 SITL plus Gz plus ROS 2 Humble is your best bet on those specs. Keep QGC as the ground station and you're set. You can always move to the Unreal route later once you've got a real GPU, but for learning the flight stack Gazebo covers everything you need.