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

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F68407700%3A21230%2F25%3A00385848" target="_blank" >RIV/68407700:21230/25:00385848 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127704" target="_blank" >https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127704</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127704" target="_blank" >10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127704</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

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

Original language description

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 opensource 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.

Czech name

—

Czech description

—

Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

—

OECD FORD branch

20204 - Robotics and automatic control

Project

Result was created during the realization of more than one project. More information in the Projects tab.

Continuities

P - Projekt vyzkumu a vyvoje financovany z verejnych zdroju (s odkazem do CEP)

Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

ISBN

979-8-3315-4139-2

ISSN

1050-4729

e-ISSN

1050-4729

Number of pages

7

Pages from-to

1611-1617

Publisher name

IEEE Industrial Electronic Society

Place of publication

Vienna

Event location

Atlanta

Event date

May 19, 2025

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

001582497400147