Plugins are how Gazebo gets extended with behavior it doesn’t natively know about. Every interesting interaction in our stack — ArduPilot driving the simulated drone, sensors emitting realistic data, motor commands turning into thrust — comes from a plugin. Without them, Gazebo would just render geometry; it wouldn’t do anything dynamic.
Three pages here cover the load-bearing plugins. ardupilot_gazebo plugin is the bridge between ArduPilot SITL and the Gazebo airframe — JSON-over-UDP messages flowing in both directions, kept in lockstep with the physics step. Custom motor physics is our replacement for the default LiftDragPlugin, tuned for the small indoor drone we’re actually building. ardupilot_gazebo bridge (Aleks’s notes) is the install-and-bring-up walkthrough — building the plugin, the gstreamer dependency, the GZ_SIM_* paths.
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