Hello,

I'm trying to tweak gazebo's physics to support higher-speed simulation times. I'm starting with several UAVs (about 40) and I've managed to get fairly good speed out of the simulation by increasing the max step size and setting the world friction values to zero. (mu / mu2 under ODE)

The one issue I can't overcome is that when I start the sim, as I add UAVs, they bounce incessantly on the ground plane because the physics updates are too low to resolve the forces. I'd like to be able to use "collidewithoutcontact" to disable contact forces upon collision, which (I presume) would take care of this issue. Of course, the UAVs then just simply fall through the ground plane.

I really only need low-quality physics to fly the UAVs - basically just gravity and collision detection are what's really required.

Any tips or pointers on how I can do a better job setting up the environment? At this point, I'm just thinking of auto-spawning the UAVs and fixing their pose on the ground plane until they're given orders to fly (shouldn't be too hard to do with a plugin if I'm correct).