VizFlyt: Perception-centric Pedagogical Framework For Autonomous Aerial Robots
This provides a practical tool for educators and students in aerial robotics courses, though it is incremental as it builds on existing HITL and simulation methods.
The authors tackled the need for a reliable testbed in aerial robotics education by presenting VizFlyt, an open-source perception-centric Hardware-In-The-Loop framework that uses 3D Gaussian Splatting to simulate photorealistic visual sensors at over 100Hz, enabling safe testing of autonomy algorithms without crash risks.
Autonomous aerial robots are becoming commonplace in our lives. Hands-on aerial robotics courses are pivotal in training the next-generation workforce to meet the growing market demands. Such an efficient and compelling course depends on a reliable testbed. In this paper, we present VizFlyt, an open-source perception-centric Hardware-In-The-Loop (HITL) photorealistic testing framework for aerial robotics courses. We utilize pose from an external localization system to hallucinate real-time and photorealistic visual sensors using 3D Gaussian Splatting. This enables stress-free testing of autonomy algorithms on aerial robots without the risk of crashing into obstacles. We achieve over 100Hz of system update rate. Lastly, we build upon our past experiences of offering hands-on aerial robotics courses and propose a new open-source and open-hardware curriculum based on VizFlyt for the future. We test our framework on various course projects in real-world HITL experiments and present the results showing the efficacy of such a system and its large potential use cases. Code, datasets, hardware guides and demo videos are available at https://pear.wpi.edu/research/vizflyt.html