AgiPIX: Bridging Simulation and Reality in Indoor Aerial Inspection

TL;DR

Agnipix is an open-source hardware and software platform designed for indoor aerial inspection, enabling seamless transfer from simulation to real-world flight for asset inspection tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a compact, synchronized sensing platform with onboard GPU, a modular ROS 2 autonomy stack, and a digital twin, facilitating rapid development and transfer between simulation and real flights.

Findings

Successful trajectory tracking and exploration in industrial indoor environments.

Open release of hardware designs, simulation assets, and software for reproducibility.

Enables zero-shot transfer of autonomy components from simulation to real hardware.

Abstract

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.