We propose a new simulator, training approach, and policy architecture, collectively called SOUS VIDE, for end-to-end visual drone navigation. Our trained policies exhibit zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with robust real-world performance using only onboard perception and computation. Our simulator, called FiGS, couples a computationally simple drone dynamics model with a high visual fidelity Gaussian Splatting scene reconstruction. FiGS can quickly simulate drone flights producing photorealistic images at up to 130 fps. We use FiGS to collect 100k-300k image/state-action pairs from an expert MPC with privileged state and dynamics information, randomized over dynamics parameters and spatial disturbances. We then distill this expert MPC into an end-to-end visuomotor policy with a lightweight neural architecture, called SV-Net. SV-Net processes color image, optical flow and IMU data streams into low-level thrust and body rate commands at 20 Hz onboard a drone. Crucially, SV-Net includes a learned module for low-level control that adapts at runtime to variations in drone dynamics. In a campaign of 105 hardware experiments, we show SOUS VIDE policies to be robust to 30% mass variations, 40 m/s wind gusts, 60% changes in ambient brightness, shifting or removing objects from the scene, and people moving aggressively through the drone's visual field. Code, data, and videos can be found in the links above.
Flying in Gaussian Splats (FiGS) is our lightweight simulator that renders images from a Gaussian Splat along the trajectory solution of a simplified 9-dimensional drone dynamics model to produce visual and state data. To produce this data, users need only provide a short video recording of the scene with a single Aruco tag placed within it.
We train a visuomotor navigation policy using our SV-Net architecture, detailed below. Notably, the architecture incorporates a history network to perform a variant of Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA), effectively addressing variations in drone dynamics between the real world and the simulation environment used to generate the training data.
@article{low2024sousvide,
author = {Low, JunEn, and Adang, Max and Yu, Javier and Nagami, Keiko and Schwager, Mac},
title = {SOUS VIDE: Cooking Visual Drone Navigation Policies in a Gaussian Splatting Vacuum},
journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (under review)},
year = {2024},
note = {Available on arXiv: \url{https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16346}},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
eprint = {2412.16346},
primaryClass = {cs.RO},
}