Back to Newton's Laws: Learning Vision-based Agile Flight via Differentiable Physics

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Yuang, Hu, Yu, Song, Yunlong, Zou, Danping, Lin, Weiyao
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Zhang, Yuang
Hu, Yu
Song, Yunlong
Zou, Danping
Lin, Weiyao
author_facet Zhang, Yuang
Hu, Yu
Song, Yunlong
Zou, Danping
Lin, Weiyao
contents Swarm navigation in cluttered environments is a grand challenge in robotics. This work combines deep learning with first-principle physics through differentiable simulation to enable autonomous navigation of multiple aerial robots through complex environments at high speed. Our approach optimizes a neural network control policy directly by backpropagating loss gradients through the robot simulation using a simple point-mass physics model and a depth rendering engine. Despite this simplicity, our method excels in challenging tasks for both multi-agent and single-agent applications with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. In multi-agent scenarios, our system demonstrates self-organized behavior, enabling autonomous coordination without communication or centralized planning - an achievement not seen in existing traditional or learning-based methods. In single-agent scenarios, our system achieves a 90% success rate in navigating through complex environments, significantly surpassing the 60% success rate of the previous state-of-the-art approach. Our system can operate without state estimation and adapt to dynamic obstacles. In real-world forest environments, it navigates at speeds up to 20 m/s, doubling the speed of previous imitation learning-based solutions. Notably, all these capabilities are deployed on a budget-friendly $21 computer, costing less than 5% of a GPU-equipped board used in existing systems. Video demonstrations are available at https://youtu.be/LKg9hJqc2cc.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_10648
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Back to Newton's Laws: Learning Vision-based Agile Flight via Differentiable Physics
Zhang, Yuang
Hu, Yu
Song, Yunlong
Zou, Danping
Lin, Weiyao
Robotics
Swarm navigation in cluttered environments is a grand challenge in robotics. This work combines deep learning with first-principle physics through differentiable simulation to enable autonomous navigation of multiple aerial robots through complex environments at high speed. Our approach optimizes a neural network control policy directly by backpropagating loss gradients through the robot simulation using a simple point-mass physics model and a depth rendering engine. Despite this simplicity, our method excels in challenging tasks for both multi-agent and single-agent applications with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. In multi-agent scenarios, our system demonstrates self-organized behavior, enabling autonomous coordination without communication or centralized planning - an achievement not seen in existing traditional or learning-based methods. In single-agent scenarios, our system achieves a 90% success rate in navigating through complex environments, significantly surpassing the 60% success rate of the previous state-of-the-art approach. Our system can operate without state estimation and adapt to dynamic obstacles. In real-world forest environments, it navigates at speeds up to 20 m/s, doubling the speed of previous imitation learning-based solutions. Notably, all these capabilities are deployed on a budget-friendly $21 computer, costing less than 5% of a GPU-equipped board used in existing systems. Video demonstrations are available at https://youtu.be/LKg9hJqc2cc.
title Back to Newton's Laws: Learning Vision-based Agile Flight via Differentiable Physics
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10648