Using Simulation Optimization to Improve Zero-shot Policy Transfer of Quadrotors

In this work, we propose a data-driven approach to optimize the parameters of a simulation such that control policies can be directly transferred from simulation to a real-world quadrotor. Our neural network-based policies take only onboard sensor data as input and run entirely on the embed-ded hardware. In real-world experiments, we compare low-level Pulse-Width Modulated control with higher-level control structures such as Attitude Rate and Attitude, which utilize Proportional-Integral-Derivative controllers to output motor commands. Our experiments show that low-level controllers trained with Reinforcement Learning require a more accurate simulation than higher-level control policies at the expense of being less robust towards parameter uncertainties.