[bodangly]

Well, for the drones, we did base things off ground truth captured in a mocap lab, and this helped the models significantly. There always will be a jump from simulation to real world, but the smaller you make that jump the quicker you’ll have a functioning vehicle. Without that, you can spend a ton of time (wasted) in simulation when the real world is substantially different. I’m sure a sum of sine waves would get you somewhere, but only so far. To me this is a difficult problem and I think it might be best to do most development in a real world environment.

[taneq]

I was just talking about sailboats specifically, where the external forces are highly unpredictable and similar in magnitude (albeit hopefully a fair bit smaller!) than your control authority over the boat.

The work you did on drones sounds very cool and in that scenario (high powered motors, crazy nonlinear dynamics, relatively small external perturbation, at least from how you described it?) I don't doubt that ground truthing your simulation using mocap data made a huge difference.