mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Flightmare: A Flexible Quadrotor Simulator

arXiv 2009.00563 ↗First posted 1 Sep 2020cs.RO cs.AIcited by 84

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 26 in Deep reinforcement learning methods, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art quadrotor simulators have a rigid and highly-specialized structure: either are they really fast, physically accurate, or photo-realistic. In this work, we propose a novel quadrotor simulator: Flightmare. Flightmare is composed of two main components: a configurable rendering engine built on Unity and a flexible physics engine for dynamics simulation. Those two components are totally decoupled and can run independently of each other. This makes our simulator extremely fast: rendering achieves speeds of up to 230 Hz, while physics simulation of up to 200,000 Hz on a laptop. In addition, Flightmare comes with several desirable features: (i) a large multi-modal sensor suite, including an interface to extract the 3D point-cloud of the scene; (ii) an API for reinforcement learning which can simulate hundreds of quadrotors in parallel; and (iii) integration with a virtual-reality headset for interaction with the simulated environment. We demonstrate the flexibility of Flightmare by using it for two different robotic tasks: quadrotor control using deep reinforcement learning and collision-free path planning in a complex 3D environment.

Key facts. Cited by 84 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 1 Sep 2020.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 9; 2022: 11; 2023: 10; 2024: 16; 2025: 20; 2026: 18.

84 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2021Learning High-Speed Flight in the Wildcited by 128
  2. 2023Reaching the Limit in Autonomous Racing: Optimal Control versus Reinforcement Learningcited by 111
  3. 2021VISTA 2.0: An Open, Data-driven Simulator for Multimodal Sensing and Policy Learning for Autonomous Vehiclescited by 81
  4. 2021Learning to Fly -- a Gym Environment with PyBullet Physics for Reinforcement Learning of Multi-agent Quadcopter Controlcited by 77
  5. 2021Autonomous Drone Racing with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 60
  6. 2021safe-control-gym: a Unified Benchmark Suite for Safe Learning-based Control and Reinforcement Learning in Roboticscited by 50
  7. 2022Multi-Robot Collaborative Perception with Graph Neural Networkscited by 35
  8. 2023OmniDrones: An Efficient and Flexible Platform for Reinforcement Learning in Drone Controlcited by 33
  9. 20213DB: A Framework for Debugging Computer Vision Modelscited by 31
  10. 2023Learning to Fly in Secondscited by 31
  11. 2024Bootstrapping Reinforcement Learning with Imitation for Vision-Based Agile Flightcited by 31
  12. 2023Fully neuromorphic vision and control for autonomous drone flightcited by 30
38 more
  1. 2022Learning Perception-Aware Agile Flight in Cluttered Environmentscited by 23
  2. 2022Training Efficient Controllers via Analytic Policy Gradientcited by 22
  3. 2022Learning a Single Near-hover Position Controller for Vastly Different Quadcopterscited by 21
  4. 2021Policy Search for Model Predictive Control with Application to Agile Drone Flightcited by 20
  5. 2024Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Quadrotorscited by 20
  6. 2024Learning Quadrotor Control From Visual Features Using Differentiable Simulationcited by 19
  7. 2025GauSS-MI: Gaussian Splatting Shannon Mutual Information for Active 3D Reconstructioncited by 17
  8. 2024SOUS VIDE: Cooking Visual Drone Navigation Policies in a Gaussian Splatting Vacuumcited by 16
  9. 2022Learning Deep Sensorimotor Policies for Vision-based Autonomous Drone Racingcited by 15
  10. 2023Contrastive Learning for Enhancing Robust Scene Transfer in Vision-based Agile Flightcited by 15
  11. 2025Dream to Fly: Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Drone Flightcited by 15
  12. 2024Vision Transformers for End-to-End Vision-Based Quadrotor Obstacle Avoidancecited by 14
  13. 2024Gaussian Splatting to Real World Flight Navigation Transfer with Liquid Networkscited by 14
  14. 2024Reinforcement Learning for Collision-free Flight Exploiting Deep Collision Encodingcited by 13
  15. 2024MAVRL: Learn to Fly in Cluttered Environments with Varying Speedcited by 13
  16. 2023ImMesh: An Immediate LiDAR Localization and Meshing Frameworkcited by 11
  17. 2023Vision-based Learning for Drones: A Surveycited by 11
  18. 2025Accelerating Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with State-Space World Modelscited by 10
  19. 2026SkyJEPA: Learning Long-Horizon World Models for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Control of Quadrotorscited by 9
  20. 2023An Informative Path Planning Framework for Active Learning in UAV-based Semantic Mappingcited by 8
  21. 2023Contrastive Initial State Buffer for Reinforcement Learningcited by 8
  22. 2022Visual Attention Prediction Improves Performance of Autonomous Drone Racing Agentscited by 7
  23. 2024VisFly: An Efficient and Versatile Simulator for Training Vision-based Flightcited by 7
  24. 2024Environment as Policy: Learning to Race in Unseen Trackscited by 6
  25. 2024Student-Informed Teacher Trainingcited by 6
  26. 2025RAPID: Robust and Agile Planner Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Drone Navigationcited by 6
  27. 2025Quadrotor Navigation using Reinforcement Learning with Privileged Informationcited by 6
  28. 2021AutoTune: Controller Tuning for High-Speed Flightcited by 5
  29. 2023QuadSwarm: A Modular Multi-Quadrotor Simulator for Deep Reinforcement Learning with Direct Thrust Controlcited by 5
  30. 2025Reactive Aerobatic Flight via Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  31. 2026CARLA-Air: Fly Drones Inside a CARLA World -- A Unified Infrastructure for Air-Ground Embodied Intelligencecited by 5
  32. 2021On games and simulators as a platform for development of artificial intelligence for command and controlcited by 3
  33. 2025TACO: General Acrobatic Flight Control via Target-and-Command-Oriented Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  34. 2025Depth Transfer: Learning to See Like a Simulator for Real-World Drone Navigationcited by 3
  35. 2025DiffAero: A GPU-Accelerated Differentiable Simulation Framework for Efficient Quadrotor Policy Learningcited by 3
  36. 2022Vision-based Perimeter Defense via Multiview Pose Estimationcited by 2
  37. 2022Output Feedback Tube MPC-Guided Data Augmentation for Robust, Efficient Sensorimotor Policy Learningcited by 2
  38. 2024Time-optimal Flight in Cluttered Environments via Safe Reinforcement Learningcited by 2

50 most cited of 84 All 84 (JSON)