AgiPIX: Bridging Simulation and Reality in Indoor Aerial Inspection

arXiv cs.RO / 4/10/2026

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Key Points

  • AgiPIX is an open hardware-and-software platform aimed at enabling autonomous indoor aerial inspection by addressing gaps in perception, planning, control, and learning across simulation and real-world deployment.
  • The platform combines a compact hardware-synchronized active-sensing setup with onboard GPU-accelerated compute to support agile flight and industrial indoor use cases.
  • It provides a containerized ROS 2 modular autonomy stack plus a photorealistic digital twin and a reliable UI to improve reproducibility and iteration.
  • The authors report rapid development through zero-shot transfer of containerized autonomy components between simulation and real flights, demonstrated via onboard trajectory tracking and exploration.
  • All hardware designs, simulation assets, and containerized software are released openly with documentation to support reproducible research and deployment.

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.