{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Daily Paper Cast","title":"CARLA-Air: Fly Drones Inside a CARLA World -- A Unified Infrastructure for Air-Ground Embodied Intelligence","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1700,"description":"\n 🤗 Upvotes: 230 | cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.HC\n\n Authors:\n Tianle Zeng, Hanxuan Chen, Yanci Wen, Hong Zhang\n\n Title:\n CARLA-Air: Fly Drones Inside a CARLA World -- A Unified Infrastructure for Air-Ground Embodied Intelligence\n\n Arxiv:\n http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28032v1\n\n Abstract:\n The convergence of low-altitude economies, embodied intelligence, and air-ground cooperative systems creates growing demand for simulation infrastructure capable of jointly modeling aerial and ground agents within a single physically coherent environment. Existing open-source platforms remain domain-segregated: driving simulators lack aerial dynamics, while multirotor simulators lack realistic ground scenes. Bridge-based co-simulation introduces synchronization overhead and cannot guarantee strict spatial-temporal consistency. We present CARLA-Air, an open-source infrastructure that unifies high-fidelity urban driving and physics-accurate multirotor flight within a single Unreal Engine process. The platform preserves both CARLA and AirSim native Python APIs and ROS 2 interfaces, enabling zero-modification code reuse. Within a shared physics tick and rendering pipeline, CARLA-Air delivers photorealistic environments with rule-compliant traffic, socially-aware pedestrians, and aerodynamically consistent UAV dynamics, synchronously capturing up to 18 sensor modalities across all platforms at each tick. The platform supports representative air-ground embodied intelligence workloads spanning cooperation, embodied navigation and vision-language action, multi-modal perception and dataset construction, and reinforcement-learning-based policy training. An extensible asset pipeline allows integration of custom robot platforms into the shared world. By inheriting AirSim's aerial capabilities -- whose upstream development has been archived -- CARLA-Air ensures this widely adopted flight stack...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/8lOVNnuwhrA3rxrDMv7Osu4j_t1-jORooO6NfGcQhcw/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81Zjg1/YzRhODczMDU4MmE4/OGMwN2FiNDlmYzI2/MDliMi5qcGVn.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}