AgiPIX: Bridging Simulation and Reality in Indoor Aerial Inspection
2026-04-09 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors developed Agipix, a small flying robot system designed to inspect important indoor places by itself. It includes both the hardware (robot design and sensors) and the software needed to control it, all working well in both computer simulations and real life. Their system uses advanced computing onboard to help the robot fly smoothly and explore indoor industrial areas. They also share all their designs and software openly for others to use and improve. This helps researchers quickly test and use the robot in different environments without rebuilding everything.
indoor flightactive sensingROS 2GPU accelerationdigital twinautonomous navigationtrajectory trackingopen-source roboticscontainerized softwareinspection drones
Authors
Sasanka Kuruppu Arachchige, Juan Jose Garcia, Changda Tian, Lauri Suomela, Panos Trahanias, Adriana Tapus, Joni-Kristian Kämäräinen
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.