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| Main Authors: | , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10247 |
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| _version_ | 1866908535498997760 |
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| author | Zhang, Xinhong Wang, Runqing Ren, Yunfan Sun, Jian Fang, Hao Chen, Jie Wang, Gang |
| author_facet | Zhang, Xinhong Wang, Runqing Ren, Yunfan Sun, Jian Fang, Hao Chen, Jie Wang, Gang |
| contents | This letter introduces DiffAero, a lightweight, GPU-accelerated, and fully differentiable simulation framework designed for efficient quadrotor control policy learning. DiffAero supports both environment-level and agent-level parallelism and integrates multiple dynamics models, customizable sensor stacks (IMU, depth camera, and LiDAR), and diverse flight tasks within a unified, GPU-native training interface. By fully parallelizing both physics and rendering on the GPU, DiffAero eliminates CPU-GPU data transfer bottlenecks and delivers orders-of-magnitude improvements in simulation throughput. In contrast to existing simulators, DiffAero not only provides high-performance simulation but also serves as a research platform for exploring differentiable and hybrid learning algorithms. Extensive benchmarks and real-world flight experiments demonstrate that DiffAero and hybrid learning algorithms combined can learn robust flight policies in hours on consumer-grade hardware. The code is available at https://github.com/flyingbitac/diffaero. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_10247 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | DiffAero: A GPU-Accelerated Differentiable Simulation Framework for Efficient Quadrotor Policy Learning Zhang, Xinhong Wang, Runqing Ren, Yunfan Sun, Jian Fang, Hao Chen, Jie Wang, Gang Robotics This letter introduces DiffAero, a lightweight, GPU-accelerated, and fully differentiable simulation framework designed for efficient quadrotor control policy learning. DiffAero supports both environment-level and agent-level parallelism and integrates multiple dynamics models, customizable sensor stacks (IMU, depth camera, and LiDAR), and diverse flight tasks within a unified, GPU-native training interface. By fully parallelizing both physics and rendering on the GPU, DiffAero eliminates CPU-GPU data transfer bottlenecks and delivers orders-of-magnitude improvements in simulation throughput. In contrast to existing simulators, DiffAero not only provides high-performance simulation but also serves as a research platform for exploring differentiable and hybrid learning algorithms. Extensive benchmarks and real-world flight experiments demonstrate that DiffAero and hybrid learning algorithms combined can learn robust flight policies in hours on consumer-grade hardware. The code is available at https://github.com/flyingbitac/diffaero. |
| title | DiffAero: A GPU-Accelerated Differentiable Simulation Framework for Efficient Quadrotor Policy Learning |
| topic | Robotics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10247 |