MAPLEAF 0.8.4

A compact, extensible rocket flight simulation framework for researchers and rocket designers

MAPLEAF: Modular Aerospace Prediction Lab for Engines and Aero Forces

Install:

pip install MAPLEAF

Running a Simulation

$ mapleaf path/to/SimDefinitionFile.mapleaf

Sample simulation definitions: MAPLEAF/Examples/Simulations
Example cases be run with just the case name: $ mapleaf NASATwoStageOrbitalRocket
This is the same as running: $ mapleaf MAPLEAF/Examples/Simulations/NASATwoStageOrbitalRocket.mapleaf from MAPLEAF's install location

Simulation Definition Files

Brief overview below. More info, and definitions of all possible options in: SimDefinitionTemplate.mapleaf

Format is a simple key-value syntax similar to JSON or YAML.
Dictionaries can be nested arbitrarily deeply and are brace-delimited.
Keys and values in a dictionary are separated by the first whitespace in their line
No multiline values

Example:

SimControl{
  timeDiscretization    RK45Adaptive

  TimeStepAdaptation{
    controller          PID
    PID.coefficients    -0.01 -0.001 0
    targetError         0.0001
  }
}

Code folding is very helpful in maintaining a file overview:

The possible top level dictionaries are 'Monte Carlo', 'SimControl', 'Environment', and 'Rocket'. Of these, only the 'Rocket' dictionary is strictly required to run a simulation, and defines the rocket's initial position/velocity and the inertial/aerodynamic/control models used to simulate it.
The rocket is defined by nested subdictionaries, where the first level of nesting defines the rocket's stage(s) and the second level defines the component(s) in each stage:

Default values from the defaultConfigValues dictionary in MAPLEAF/IO/SimDefinition.py will fill in for omitted keys. Most defaults match the values in SimDefinitionTemplate.mapleaf.

Simulation Outputs

Depending on the options specified in the SimControl dictionary, MAPLEAF will output:

• Detailed tabulated simulation position, component force, aerodynamic coefficient and control logs (see SimControl.loggingLevel):

• Flight animations (see SimControl.plot)
  

• Flight path visualizations (see SimControl.plot - Mayavi is required to render these ones showing the Earth)
  

• Plots of any logged parameter (see SimControl.plot or --plotFromLog command line option)
  

Monte Carlo Simulations

Monte Carlo simulations propagate uncertainties in simulation inputs through to simulation outputs.
Any scalar or vector parameter in simulation definition files can be made probabilistic by adding a second parameter with _stdDev appended to the name:

To execute a batch run of this now-probabilistic simulation, create the top-level 'Monte Carlo' dictionary (see SimDefinitionTemplate.mapleaf)

Then, MAPLEAF can produce distributions of outputs like landing locations:

Developers

Contributions are welcome. To learn about the code, have a look at README_Dev.md, and the code/api documentation website