Innovation at Skydio: Building Paraverse for High-Performance Drone Simulation
What started out being called RayWorld. Matias Varnum, Autonomy Engineer, at Skydio speaks to how he developed what was to become Skydio Paraverse our widely used drone flight simulator.
- Hi, I'm Matthias and I built Rayworld, a high performance ray tracer for highly
- accurate non-linear camera models that is used in our simulator.
- So in our system we actually run the full autonomy systems.
- This makes it so the experience is a lot closer to the actual real experience
- of flying in drone.
- As soon as you push out new features that affect the behavior of the real
- vehicle, those appear immediately in the simulator vehicle as well.
- So the navigation cameras on our drone are highly non-linear and has very
- strong fisheye distortion.
- You could render images like this in our old render, but this required multiple
- steps and was very costly.
- And when we have six cameras that are like that and are fairly high resolution,
- that is what became extremely slow.
- So the animation here was that we have implemented this new render as a fully
- ray traced render while still making it fast.
- So I move around, it unloads the low resolution assets and then it loads in
- high resolution assets based on how close it is to the camera.
- What this allows us is essentially to allow any user to fly anywhere in the
- world.
- I definitely do consider it a success.
- Tailspeople will tell me that they actually help them show our product and show
- how it can be valuable for our customers, and that is extremely rewarding.
- My grandfather was an engineer, I really looked up to him.
- I've always really enjoyed trying to look at problems from a different angle.
- Try to think, how can we do this better, how can we do this more efficiently.
- So I wanted to prove that I could do it to work with other engineers that were
- pushing the state of the arch in that way really appealed to me.
- Skydo is very much a company that appreciates good ideas, no matter where they
- come from.
- Essentially this kind of video game we have made actually actually provide real
- value for both my co-workers and also customers.
Watch Time
2 Mins 11 Secs