AirSim

AirSim (Aerial Informatics and Robotics Simulation) is an open-source, cross-platform simulator for drones, ground vehicles such as cars and various other objects, built on Epic Games’ proprietary Unreal Engine 4 as a platform for AI research.² It is developed by Microsoft and can be used to experiment with deep learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles.³⁴ This allows testing of autonomous solutions without worrying about real-world damage.⁵

AirSim provides some 12 kilometers of roads with 20 city blocks and APIs to retrieve data and control vehicles in a platform independent way. The APIs are accessible via a variety of programming languages, including C++, C#, Python and Java. AirSim supports hardware-in-the-loop with driving wheels and flight controllers such as PX4 for physically and visually realistic simulations. The platform also supports common robotic platforms, such as Robot Operating System (ROS).⁶ It is developed as an Unreal plug-in that can be dropped into any Unreal environment.⁷ An experimental release for a Unity plug-in is also available.⁸⁹

On December 15, 2023 Microsoft has shutdown the development of the project.¹⁰