The AscTec Hummingbird was a compact quadrotor built by Ascending Technologies GmbH, Munich — a fixture of university robotics labs through the 2010s, cited in hundreds of control and estimation papers before Intel acquired the company in 2016 and folded its product line into Intel’s own drone business. This description comes from RotorS, a MAV simulator built by ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab, whose own researchers flew real Hummingbirds and tuned this model’s mass and dimensions against the hardware in their lab — its 0.68 kg body plus four 9 g rotors (≈ 716 g total) sits right inside AscTec’s own published 500–710 g weight range.
The mechanism
Four rotors in a plus configuration, each on its own continuous joint driven by its own
motor — a standard quadrotor layout, no mimic joints or shared actuation. base_link, the
URDF’s root link, is a massless dummy frame joined to the real body
(base_link_inertia) by a fixed joint.
About these files — read before importing
This links directly to ETH Zurich’s own
rotors_simulator repository, unmodified —
Ascending Technologies GmbH no longer publishes this description itself. RotorS publishes
the description as .xacro files rather than a literal .urdf; ARMOR expands the macros
itself after downloading, so Open in ARMOR gives you a working robot; nothing here is a
pre-baked derivative of ETH Zurich’s files.