HyperDrone: 20x faster quadrotor sim transfers to Crazyflie
TL;DR
- HyperDrone claims a batch quadrotor simulator more than 20x faster than existing state-of-the-art, with rendering and dynamics both running on the GPU.
- Its ray-tracing engine HyperLux supports Nvidia OptiX, Vulkan, Apple Metal and WebGPU, and reports millions of FPS on consumer GPUs at high fidelity.
- The authors trained a vision-based yaw-control policy purely in simulation and ran it onboard a small-scale Crazyflie quadrotor with a camera.
HyperDrone is a new quadrotor simulator whose authors say it runs "more than 20x faster than existing state-of-the-art batch quadrotor simulators," pairing optimized multirotor dynamics with a GPU-native ray tracer called HyperLux.
Authors Jonas Eschmann and Giuseppe Loianno write in the paper that HyperLux renders "RGB, depth, semantic/instance segmentation, surface normals and optical flow observations" and reaches "millions of Frames Per Second (FPS) on consumer-grade GPUs" even with reflections, physically based rendering and motion blur turned on. The engine supports Nvidia OptiX, Vulkan, Apple Metal and WebGPU, so both dynamics and rendering can sit on the same GPU as the policy learner.
The sim-to-real demonstration is narrower. The paper trains "a vision-based yaw-control policy purely in simulation" and transfers it to "a real small-scale quadrotor (Crazyflie) with a camera, running completely onboard."
Which batch simulator the 20x is measured against, at what resolution or scene complexity, and how often the Crazyflie policy succeeded: none of that is in the abstract. The paper is listed as accepted at CoRL 2026.
Originally reported by paper
Read the original article →Original headline: HyperDrone Quadrotor Simulator Runs 20x Faster Than SOTA, Verified Sim-to-Real on Crazyflie — CoRL 2026