AgiPIX: Bridging Simulation and Reality in Indoor Aerial Inspection
This provides a practical solution for researchers and practitioners in robotics and aerial inspection, though it is incremental as it builds on existing modular and containerized approaches.
The paper tackles the lack of a reproducible, open-source platform for autonomous indoor aerial inspection by presenting Agipix, a co-designed hardware and software system that enables zero-shot transfer between simulation and real-world flights, with all components released openly.
Autonomous indoor flight for critical asset inspection presents fundamental challenges in perception, planning, control, and learning. Despite rapid progress, there is still a lack of a compact, active-sensing, open-source platform that is reproducible across simulation and real-world operation. To address this gap, we present Agipix, a co-designed open hardware and software platform for indoor aerial autonomy and critical asset inspection. Agipix features a compact, hardware-synchronized active-sensing platform with onboard GPU-accelerated compute that is capable of agile flight; a containerized ROS~2-based modular autonomy stack; and a photorealistic digital twin of the hardware platform together with a reliable UI. These elements enable rapid iteration via zero-shot transfer of containerized autonomy components between simulation and real flights. We demonstrate trajectory tracking and exploration performance using onboard sensing in industrial indoor environments. All hardware designs, simulation assets, and containerized software are released openly together with documentation.