Embodiment-conditioned Generalist Control for Multirotor Aerial Robots
About
We present a generalist position control policy capable of controlling arbitrary multirotor configurations of a certain rotor count (e.g., hexarotors or quadrotors) with a single set of network weights. The policy is conditioned on a physics-grounded embodiment descriptor: a mass and inertia-normalized control allocation matrix that captures how mass-normalized motor thrusts generate linear and angular accelerations in the body-frame. To train the policy, we sample from a broad distribution of arbitrary multirotor configurations, including non-planar and asymmetric systems, and optimize a single, compact network using Proximal Policy Optimization. Training requires only five minutes on an RTX 3090 GPU using a custom NVIDIA Warp-based dynamics simulator. Through extensive simulation experiments, we show that embodiment conditioning enables robust generalist control across arbitrary morphologies. We demonstrate zero-shot real-world transfer of this generalist policy on three diverse hexarotor systems, including a planar robot, a partially symmetric non-planar system, and a random asymmetric, non-planar configuration.