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arXiv · 2009.00563

Flightmare: A Flexible Quadrotor Simulator

Yunlong Song·Selim Naji·Elia Kaufmann·Antonio Loquercio·Davide Scaramuzza
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Abstract

State-of-the-art quadrotor simulators have a rigid and highly-specialized structure: either are they really fast, physically accurate, or photo-realistic. In this work, we propose a novel quadrotor simulator: Flightmare. Flightmare is composed of two main components: a configurable rendering engine built on Unity and a flexible physics engine for dynamics simulation. Those two components are totally decoupled and can run independently of each other. This makes our simulator extremely fast: rendering achieves speeds of up to 230 Hz, while physics simulation of up to 200,000 Hz on a laptop. In addition, Flightmare comes with several desirable features: (i) a large multi-modal sensor suite, including an interface to extract the 3D point-cloud of the scene; (ii) an API for reinforcement learning which can simulate hundreds of quadrotors in parallel; and (iii) integration with a virtual-reality headset for interaction with the simulated environment. We demonstrate the flexibility of Flightmare by using it for two different robotic tasks: quadrotor control using deep reinforcement learning and collision-free path planning in a complex 3D environment.

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Yunlong Song, Selim Naji, Elia Kaufmann, Antonio Loquercio, Davide Scaramuzza. 2020-09-01. Flightmare: A Flexible Quadrotor Simulator. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00563

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