  State-of-the-art quadrotor simulators have a rigid and highly-specialized
structure: either are they really fast, physically accurate, or
photo-realistic. In this work, we propose a novel quadrotor simulator:
Flightmare. Flightmare is composed of two main components: a configurable
rendering engine built on Unity and a flexible physics engine for dynamics
simulation. Those two components are totally decoupled and can run
independently of each other. This makes our simulator extremely fast: rendering
achieves speeds of up to 230 Hz, while physics simulation of up to 200,000 Hz
on a laptop. In addition, Flightmare comes with several desirable features: (i)
a large multi-modal sensor suite, including an interface to extract the 3D
point-cloud of the scene; (ii) an API for reinforcement learning which can
simulate hundreds of quadrotors in parallel; and (iii) integration with a
virtual-reality headset for interaction with the simulated environment. We
demonstrate the flexibility of Flightmare by using it for two different robotic
tasks: quadrotor control using deep reinforcement learning and collision-free
path planning in a complex 3D environment.
