FlightForge: Advancing UAV Research with Procedural Generation of High-Fidelity Simulation and Integrated Autonomy

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Čapek, David, Hrnčíř, Jan, Báča, Tomáš, Jirkal, Jakub, Vonásek, Vojtěch, Pěnička, Robert, Saska, Martin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Čapek, David
Hrnčíř, Jan
Báča, Tomáš
Jirkal, Jakub
Vonásek, Vojtěch
Pěnička, Robert
Saska, Martin
author_facet Čapek, David
Hrnčíř, Jan
Báča, Tomáš
Jirkal, Jakub
Vonásek, Vojtěch
Pěnička, Robert
Saska, Martin
contents Robotic simulators play a crucial role in the development and testing of autonomous systems, particularly in the realm of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV). However, existing simulators often lack high-level autonomy, hindering their immediate applicability to complex tasks such as autonomous navigation in unknown environments. This limitation stems from the challenge of integrating realistic physics, photorealistic rendering, and diverse sensor modalities into a single simulation environment. At the same time, the existing photorealistic UAV simulators use mostly hand-crafted environments with limited environment sizes, which prevents the testing of long-range missions. This restricts the usage of existing simulators to only low-level tasks such as control and collision avoidance. To this end, we propose the novel FlightForge UAV open-source simulator. FlightForge offers advanced rendering capabilities, diverse control modalities, and, foremost, procedural generation of environments. Moreover, the simulator is already integrated with a fully autonomous UAV system capable of long-range flights in cluttered unknown environments. The key innovation lies in novel procedural environment generation and seamless integration of high-level autonomy into the simulation environment. Experimental results demonstrate superior sensor rendering capability compared to existing simulators, and also the ability of autonomous navigation in almost infinite environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05038
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FlightForge: Advancing UAV Research with Procedural Generation of High-Fidelity Simulation and Integrated Autonomy
Čapek, David
Hrnčíř, Jan
Báča, Tomáš
Jirkal, Jakub
Vonásek, Vojtěch
Pěnička, Robert
Saska, Martin
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotic simulators play a crucial role in the development and testing of autonomous systems, particularly in the realm of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV). However, existing simulators often lack high-level autonomy, hindering their immediate applicability to complex tasks such as autonomous navigation in unknown environments. This limitation stems from the challenge of integrating realistic physics, photorealistic rendering, and diverse sensor modalities into a single simulation environment. At the same time, the existing photorealistic UAV simulators use mostly hand-crafted environments with limited environment sizes, which prevents the testing of long-range missions. This restricts the usage of existing simulators to only low-level tasks such as control and collision avoidance. To this end, we propose the novel FlightForge UAV open-source simulator. FlightForge offers advanced rendering capabilities, diverse control modalities, and, foremost, procedural generation of environments. Moreover, the simulator is already integrated with a fully autonomous UAV system capable of long-range flights in cluttered unknown environments. The key innovation lies in novel procedural environment generation and seamless integration of high-level autonomy into the simulation environment. Experimental results demonstrate superior sensor rendering capability compared to existing simulators, and also the ability of autonomous navigation in almost infinite environments.
title FlightForge: Advancing UAV Research with Procedural Generation of High-Fidelity Simulation and Integrated Autonomy
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05038