Developing and testing novel control and motion planning algorithms for aerial vehicles can be a challenging task, with the robotics community relying more than ever on 3D simulation technologies to evaluate the performance of new algorithms in a variety of conditions and environments. In this work, we introduce the Pegasus Simulator, a modular framework implemented as an NVIDIA Isaac Sim extension that enables real-time simulation of multiple multirotor vehicles in photo-realistic environments, while providing out-of-the-box integration with the widely adopted PX4-Autopilot and ROS2 through its modular implementation and intuitive graphical user interface. To demonstrate some of its capabilities, a nonlinear controller was implemented and simulation results for two drones performing aggressive flight maneuvers are presented. Code and documentation for this framework are also provided as supplementary material.
@article{arxiv.2307.05263,
title = {Pegasus Simulator: An Isaac Sim Framework for Multiple Aerial Vehicles Simulation},
author = {Marcelo Jacinto and João Pinto and Jay Patrikar and John Keller and Rita Cunha and Sebastian Scherer and António Pascoal},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.05263},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
This paper has been accepted for publication in the 2024 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), IEEE