Techpod is a small, hand-launchable fixed-wing aircraft — a 2.6 m wingspan, roughly 2.65 kg T-tail airframe built by Applied Aeronautics, a small Austin, Texas drone manufacturer whose flagship product today is the longer-range Albatross. This particular description comes not from Applied Aeronautics but from RotorS, ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab MAV simulator — the same lab that actually built and flew this exact airframe in its own trajectory-tracking and model-predictive-control flight experiments, and tuned this model’s mass and dimensions against the hardware they flew.
The mechanism
A fixed-pitch pusher propeller on a continuous joint is the airframe’s only real degree of
freedom in this description. Six control surfaces — two ailerons, an elevator, two flaps,
and a rudder — each get their own link and joint, but every one of those joints is declared
with zero range in the source file (RotorS drives control-surface deflection through its own
aerodynamics plugin rather than joint-space actuation), so as published here they’re fixed
in place rather than posable. base_link, the URDF’s root link, is a massless dummy frame
joined to the real fuselage (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 —
Applied Aeronautics doesn’t publish 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 model; nothing here is a
pre-baked derivative of ETH Zurich’s files.