# Research team uses differentiable simulation to learn quadrotor dynamic narrow-gap traversal from scratch

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-28T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/acf7ufzypcdkyoc3eo883ynw8
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.37557

## Summary

The research proposes a differentiable moving narrow-gap modeling method that gates centering, alignment, and smooth collision terms by signed distance to a time-varying gap plane, turning sparse traversal events into dense pathwise objectives, and integrates this into a visual-feature-to-command policy trained in a single stage from random initialization, without a teacher, planner, or distillation. In simulation, path gradients clearly outperform score-function gradients, reaching a 99.3% success rate after a few minutes of training on a single GPU. The policy transfers directly to a real quadrotor using only onboard vision and inertial measurements, successfully traversing the dynamic narrow gap in 8 of 10 real-world trials.