Pegasus Simulator: An Isaac Sim Framework for Multiple Aerial Vehicles Simulation

TL;DR

Pegasus Simulator is a modular, real-time simulation framework for multiple aerial vehicles in realistic environments, integrated with PX4-Autopilot and ROS2, aiding development and testing of control algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a new NVIDIA Isaac Sim extension enabling multi-drone simulation with seamless integration and user-friendly interface.

Findings

Successfully simulated aggressive drone maneuvers

Demonstrated real-time performance and integration capabilities

Provided open-source code and documentation

Abstract

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.