[2603.28032] CARLA-Air: Fly Drones Inside a CARLA World -- A Unified Infrastructure for Air-Ground Embodied Intelligence

Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2603.28032 (cs) [Submitted on 30 Mar 2026] Title:CARLA-Air: Fly Drones Inside a CARLA World -- A Unified Infrastructure for Air-Ground Embodied Intelligence Authors:Tianle Zeng, Hanxuan Chen, Yanci Wen, Hong Zhang View a PDF of the paper titled CARLA-Air: Fly Drones Inside a CARLA World -- A Unified Infrastructure for Air-Ground Embodied Intelligence, by Tianle Zeng and 3 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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, synch...