simulating air friction in gazebo for flying objects

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Colleagues and me are actually looking into that too right now. Currently, I have two possible approaches in mind (not tested yet):

1. Implement a new plugin starting from a copy of the gazebo_ros_force plugin and apply the necessary forces for simulating air friction there. This plugin could also receive the desired wrench generated by the quadrotor control system and apply them. The quadrotor will then exhibit "realistic" behavior out of the box when spawned in gazebo
2. Use the unmodified gazebo_ros_force plugin and do the calculations (mixing of air friction forces and desired wrench from the controller) in an ROS node outside gazebo. This node then publishes the resulting overall wrench to the gazebo_ros_force plugin. This approach gets away without writing a new plugin, but the friction forces would be calculated outside gazebo.

See also this related question: http://answers.ros.org/question/3489/applying-wrench-to-object-and-update-rate-of

I'll try to clean up our basic quadrotor model for gazebo a little and upload it in the next 2 or 3 days. I'm not aware of an existing available implementation of a ROS enabled quadrotor sim.