Nausicaa: Project Materials for Viability-Guided Sim-to-Real Transfer for a Small Fixed-Wing Glider in Uncertain Indoor Updrafts

Overview This record archives the project materials for the thesis Viability-Guided Sim-to-Real Transfer for a Small Fixed-Wing Glider in Uncertain Indoor Updrafts. Motivated by low-altitude fixed-wing flight near terrain, structures, and other flow-shaping boundaries, the thesis studies whether a small fixed-wing glider controller developed in simulation can transfer to repeated real flights through uncertain local updrafts. The project develops a repeatable indoor fixed-wing sim-to-real workflow in Imperial College London's Brahmal Vasudevan Multi Terrain Aerial Robotics Arena, combining Vicon motion-capture feedback, a measured command path and latency model, a manufactured glider, a safety-bounded flight volume, and fan-generated updrafts represented by measured but imperfect surrogates. The controller is formulated as viability-guided manoeuvre primitive selection. Rather than tracking a single planned trajectory through an uncertain flow field, the glider repeatedly selects short stabilised manoeuvre primitives every 0.10 s in flight. The associated thesis reports offline primitive generation and validation, dense-library compression, spatial lift-memory tests, 36,000 mission simulations, 384,795 executed primitive segments, and repeated real-flight transfer tests in fixed and random fan layouts. Repository and DOI Thesis manuscript DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21083555 Project materials DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20927007 Browsable workflow repository: GH-X-ST/Nausicaa Release tag: v2026.06-thesis Repository snapshot commit: f838b44829e20057d9119cf127eab9e544a9d42b Archive Contents This Zenodo record contains the project materials archive. It includes a source code snapshot, configurations, processed datasets, calibration artefacts, frozen controller inputs, controller-development and validation outputs, real-flight records, sim-real replay diagnostics, plotting scripts, generated figures and tables, editable source files where released, and reproducibility manifests. Uploaded Files The upload is split into these files: nausicaa_repo_source_v2026.06-thesis.tar.gz: source code snapshot, configuration files, and the software license. nausicaa_processed_data_and_logs_v2026.06-thesis.tar.gz: processed simulation outputs, thermal-model result tables, timing-test logs, controller-validation outputs, and latency-result data. nausicaa_figures_tables_and_manifests_v2026.06-thesis.tar.gz: generated figures, tables, photographs, sketches, CAD/design artefacts, repository media, and package inventory manifests. nausicaa_real_flight_records_v2026.06-thesis.tar.gz: frozen controller inputs, real-flight records, calibration records, runtime metrics, and replay diagnostics from the flight-test workflow. manifest_sha256.csv: SHA-256 checksums for the uploaded archive files. Archive Layout and Exclusions Each archive preserves repository-relative paths. The repository's .git/, docs/, root README.md, .gitignore, and .gitattributes paths are intentionally excluded. Reproducibility Boundary The record is a project-materials archive. Software-only inspection should start from the GitHub repository and release tag. Computational results based on simulation, modelling, optimisation, system identification, and post processing can be inspected or selectively reproduced from the supplied scripts, configuration files, and fixed random seeds where used. Dense simulation regeneration, physical updraft measurement, Vicon-based flight testing, and hardware-facing scripts require the corresponding experimental setup. Physical flight measurements cannot be exactly regenerated from the archived files alone. Software Environment Tested Tools The workflow was prepared around these tested tools: Windows 11 25H2 Python 3.12.11 MATLAB R2026a Arduino IDE 2.3.8 Vicon Tracker 3.9 Dependencies There is no single root dependency file for the complete workflow. Some subfolders contain local environment files such as environment.yml or environment.toml. Checksum Verification Use manifest_sha256.csv to verify the downloaded archive files. Windows PowerShell Example: Get-FileHash .\nausicaa_repo_source_v2026.06-thesis.tar.gz -Algorithm SHA256 Linux or macOS Example: sha256sum nausicaa_repo_source_v2026.06-thesis.tar.gz Compare the reported digest with the corresponding row in manifest_sha256.csv. License and Reuse The released software source is distributed under the MIT License; the license file is included in nausicaa_repo_source_v2026.06-thesis.tar.gz. Non-code materials such as data, figures, photographs, CAD files, and thesis media may have separate reuse constraints unless the Zenodo record metadata assigns a specific license to the full deposit. Reuse should cite this Zenodo record and the related thesis.