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.
DiffAero: A GPU-Accelerated Differentiable Simulation Framework for Efficient Quadrotor Policy Learning
State Key Lab of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, Beijing Institute of Technology（自主智能无人系统国家重点实验室，北京理工大学）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村academy）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Hong Kong（香港大学机械工程系）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
APACE: Agile and Perception-Aware Trajectory Generation for Quadrotor Flights
School of Artificial Intelligence, Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学人工智能学院）；Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学电子与计算机工程学系）
