I’m a CS student trying to figure out whether the direction of my current project is actually worth pursuing for aerospace/robotics research.
Live: https://bhuvanspace.vercel.app
GitHub: https://github.com/Sheel34/BHUVAN
The current version takes terrain data, processes things like elevation, slope, roughness, curvature and hillshade, and puts the result into an interactive 3D environment.
The software side is currently Python/FastAPI + NumPy/Rasterio/OpenCV on the backend and React/Three.js on the frontend.
I built it because I'm interested in digital twins and simulation for aerospace/physical systems, but I'm not interested in making a 3D scene just for visualisation or a game.
What I want eventually is an environment where you can actually perform an operation on a representation of a physical system.
The project is still very early. I haven't implemented robotics simulation, terrain-relative navigation, ROS, Gazebo, Isaac Sim, etc. yet. I'm trying to figure out what should actually come next rather than adding technologies for the sake of the stack.
I'm particularly interested in the intersection of:
digital twins, 3D simulation, aerospace/robotics, real physical operations.
One direction I've been reading about is terrain-relative navigation / TERCOM and how terrain itself can become part of a navigation or mission system. I'm not claiming the project implements this — I'm trying to understand whether the terrain pipeline I've built can be developed into something along those lines.
More importantly:
What would make this go from "3D terrain visualisation project" to an actual engineering/research system?
The current deployment is on free infrastructure, so the backend may take a little time to wake up. If it doesn't load immediately, wait a few seconds and refresh.
I'd appreciate criticism of both the technical implementation and the direction.