Simple but Stable, Fast and Safe: Achieve End-to-end Control by High-Fidelity Differentiable Simulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Fanxing, Wang, Shengyang, Huang, Yuxiang, Sun, Fangyu, Wu, Shuyu, Yan, Yufei, Zou, Danping, Yu, Wenxian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866911597303169024
author Li, Fanxing
Wang, Shengyang
Huang, Yuxiang
Sun, Fangyu
Wu, Shuyu
Yan, Yufei
Zou, Danping
Yu, Wenxian
author_facet Li, Fanxing
Wang, Shengyang
Huang, Yuxiang
Sun, Fangyu
Wu, Shuyu
Yan, Yufei
Zou, Danping
Yu, Wenxian
contents Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental vision-based task essential for enabling quadrotors to perform advanced applications. When planning the trajectory, existing approaches both on optimization and learning typically regard quadrotor as a point-mass model, giving path or velocity commands then tracking the commands by outer-loop controller. However, at high speeds, planned trajectories sometimes become dynamically infeasible in actual flight, which beyond the capacity of controller. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end policy that directly maps depth images to low-level bodyrate commands by reinforcement learning via differentiable simulation. The high-fidelity simulation in training after parameter identification significantly reduces all the gaps between training, simulation and real world. Analytical process by differentiable simulation provides accurate gradient to ensure efficiently training the low-level policy without expert guidance. The policy employs a lightweight and the most simple inference pipeline that runs without explicit mapping, backbone networks, primitives, recurrent structures, or backend controllers, nor curriculum or privileged guidance. By inferring low-level command directly to the hardware controller, the method enables full flight envelope control and avoids the dynamic-infeasible issue.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the highest success rate and the lowest jerk among state-of-the-art baselines across multiple benchmarks. The policy also exhibits strong generalization, successfully deploying zero-shot in unseen, outdoor environments while reaching speeds of up to 7.5m/s as well as stably flying in the super-dense forest. This work is released at https://github.com/Fanxing-LI/avoidance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10548
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Simple but Stable, Fast and Safe: Achieve End-to-end Control by High-Fidelity Differentiable Simulation
Li, Fanxing
Wang, Shengyang
Huang, Yuxiang
Sun, Fangyu
Wu, Shuyu
Yan, Yufei
Zou, Danping
Yu, Wenxian
Robotics
Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental vision-based task essential for enabling quadrotors to perform advanced applications. When planning the trajectory, existing approaches both on optimization and learning typically regard quadrotor as a point-mass model, giving path or velocity commands then tracking the commands by outer-loop controller. However, at high speeds, planned trajectories sometimes become dynamically infeasible in actual flight, which beyond the capacity of controller. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end policy that directly maps depth images to low-level bodyrate commands by reinforcement learning via differentiable simulation. The high-fidelity simulation in training after parameter identification significantly reduces all the gaps between training, simulation and real world. Analytical process by differentiable simulation provides accurate gradient to ensure efficiently training the low-level policy without expert guidance. The policy employs a lightweight and the most simple inference pipeline that runs without explicit mapping, backbone networks, primitives, recurrent structures, or backend controllers, nor curriculum or privileged guidance. By inferring low-level command directly to the hardware controller, the method enables full flight envelope control and avoids the dynamic-infeasible issue.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the highest success rate and the lowest jerk among state-of-the-art baselines across multiple benchmarks. The policy also exhibits strong generalization, successfully deploying zero-shot in unseen, outdoor environments while reaching speeds of up to 7.5m/s as well as stably flying in the super-dense forest. This work is released at https://github.com/Fanxing-LI/avoidance.
title Simple but Stable, Fast and Safe: Achieve End-to-end Control by High-Fidelity Differentiable Simulation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10548