Quadrotor Pendulum Simulation

I’m trying to implement an inverted pendulum on a custom quadrotor in Gazebo-Classic. This is my first time using Gazebo.

The quadrotor is done with the PX4 flight stack and I verified that it flies as intended in Gazebo. Now, I’m trying to put an inverted pendulum on top of the quadrotor and have the quadrotor to balance the pendulum. For the mounting method, I’m just going to use an empty cup. In other words, there will be no actual “joint” for mounting the pendulum on the drone. The pendulum will be inserted into this small empty cup since that’s how I will simulate in the real world.

I would appreciate help in the following parts:

  1. How to put the pendulum on top of the quadrotor as a different entity. Again, there is no physical link between the two entities.
  2. How to “start” the pendulum dynamics. Once the quadrotor takes off and has the custom controller started, I would like the pendulum to “appear” on the quadrotor in vertical position. Then the quadrotor controller will try to balance it. This is how I will run hardware experiments: have the quadrotor in stable hovering, start custom controller, and put the pendulum in the mount.

Thank you very much!

Hello!

This seems like a question best suited for https://robotics.stackexchange.com/. Would you mind posting it there?

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