Rotor output API

[ahmed-elsaharti]

Potentially helps with : #672 #2419

About

This PR adds an API that returns each rotor's speed, torque, and thrust.
This is potentially useful for the future development of energy/battery level simulation within AirSim using @sytelus 's method outlined here

The method used here is super crude and uses a global variable that gets updated with the rotor parameters with every updateRenderedState while waiting for the getRotorStates API call. This probably is not the most elegant way of doing this.
ie: Any testing and/or suggestions on how this could be improved are very welcome
Also, this is set up to work for quadrotors but scaling the struct up to take up any number of rotors is easy.

How Has This Been Tested?

This was tested with the Blocks environment on UE 4.24 with Simpleflight and PX4 SITL. No issues so far.

Screenshots:

On the python side here's the basic structure:
getRotorStates() (type = RotorStateAPI RotorStates) contains -> rotors_ rotors (type = RotorSTTVector RotorVector) contains -> rotors (type = list of rotors[0]-rotors[3] dicts) contains -> ['speed'], ['thrust'] and ['torque_scaler'] as floats

print(client.getRotorStates()):

print(client.getRotorStates().rotors_.rotor[0]):

[zimmy87]

Hi @ahmed-elsaharti, thank you for creating this PR! I have a few comments that describe an alternative to using the global variable in your code. Most of my other comments deal with naming conventions and style guidelines. Please feel free to ask any questions if you'd like extra clarification about any of my comments.

[ahmed-elsaharti]

Hi @zimmy87, Thank YOU for the EXTREMELY helpful comments!
I fixed all the naming issues, got rid of the global variable and generalized the size of 'rotors'.
Please let me know if any other modifications are needed.

[zimmy87]

Hi @ahmed-elsaharti, 2 of the checks are failing for this PR due to a unrelated break in the Unity build from another PR. The fix for this build break was committed earlier today, can you rebase this PR to pick up the fix and rerun all the checks?

[ahmed-elsaharti]

@zimmy87 Yup, that PR fixed the Unity build and the checks have passed 👍

[zimmy87]

This PR looks good for the most part, I just have 1 remaining comment.

[zimmy87]

I agree with most of @rajat2004's comments and think it would be prudent to include them before merging

[ahmed-elsaharti]

@rajat2004 @zimmy87 Thank you guys for the useful comments!
I can't for the life of me remember why I added RotorVector initially but I do agree, it is 100% redundant at this point.
I adjusted everything to:

rather than:

and added an initializer list to RotorParameters to keep things clean when populating/updating the rotor states.
One thing I know for sure is that I should stop looking at PR reviews after midnight. Everything made much more sense when I re-read the comments a few days later 😅😅

Anyway, the PR should be good to go now that the Github checks have run successfully. Let me know if any other modifications are needed.

[rajat2004]

Just some small nitpicks

[zimmy87]

This PR looks good to me and once the one remaining feedback concerning populating the rotor states is resolved, I think it will be ready for merging

[ahmed-elsaharti]

@zimmy87 the last commit (4d8b3c9) should take care of these changes. Let me know if any other changes are needed 👍

[zimmy87]

Thank you for the contribution @ahmed-elsaharti!

[condeLucas]

Hi @ahmed-elsaharti

Thank you for your contribution.

Using @sytelus 's method to have the energy/battery consumption, we have only to multiply Thrust * torque_scaler * speed for each rotor and sum then during the simulation time?

Do you know the units of these measurements?

Thank you so much for your attention.