Scalable Modular Synthetic Data Generation for Advancing Aerial Autonomy

Harnessing the benefits of drones for urban innovation at scale requires reliable aerial autonomy. One major barrier to advancing aerial autonomy has been collecting large-scale aerial datasets for training machine learning models. Due to costly and time-consuming real-world data collection through deploying drones, there has been an increasing shift towards using synthetic data for training models in drone applications. However, to increase generalizability of trained policies on synthetic data, incorporating domain randomization into the data generation workflow for addressing the sim-to-real problem becomes crucial. Current synthetic data generation tools either lack domain randomization or rely heavily on manual workload or real samples for configuring and generating diverse realistic simulation scenes. These dependencies limit scalability of the data generation workflow. Accordingly, there is a major challenge in balancing generalizability and scalability in synthetic data generation. To address these gaps, we introduce a modular scalable data generation workflow tailored to aerial autonomy applications. To generate realistic configurations of simulation scenes while increasing diversity, we present an adaptive layered domain randomization approach that creates a type-agnostic distribution space for assets over the base map of the environments before pose generation for drone trajectory. We leverage high-level scene structures to automatically place assets in valid configurations and then extend the diversity through obstacle generation and global parameter randomization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in automatically generating diverse configurations and datasets and show its potential for downstream performance optimization. Our work contributes to generating enhanced benchmark datasets for training models that can generalize better to real-world situations.