Microsoft offers drone lovers a simulator

Microsoft has created and released a simulator for drone pilots to help them avoid destroying their toys while running machine learning experiments. Not unreasonably, Redmond has figured out that UAV-fanciers would like a way to generate training data for machine learning algorithms governing autonomous flight in a simulator, instead of having the toys buzz about in meatspace where hobbyists will need to take out their wallets every time they crash into a tree, or remortgage should they happen to collide with a litigious passer-by. Dubbed AirSim, the simulator for drones (and Microsoft plans for other vehicles to be supported soon) has been built on Unreal Engine, but is otherwise open source and available today on GitHub. It is designed as a platform for artificial intelligence researchers to gobble training data and experiment with their various deep learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning algorithms to achieve functioning autonomous vehicles. While an official Linux build is due in a few weeks, the current code base is cross-platform and supports hardware-in-loop with flight controllers – such as Pixhawk – directly interacting with the simulation environment.