REALMs: An Open-Source Simulation Framework for the Development of Self-Landing Rocket Controls

The University of California, San Diego chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS at UC San Diego) is developing a liquid bipropellant self-landing rocket called Riptide. Due to the high-cost nature of rocketry, it is infeasible for most collegiate project and research groups to test their control algorithms on flight hardware. This paper presents REALMs, a suite of simulation environments to support the rapid development and validation of guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) algorithms. REALMs is composed of three simulation environments of increasing fidelity and complexity: a simple rocket model for use in early prototyping, a propeller-based drone model for small-scale testing on an educational rocket model called LanderJR, and the full rocket model for simulating the high-fidelity digital twin of Riptide.