AirSim is a simulator for drones, cars and more, built on Unreal Engine (we now also have an experimental Unity release). It is open-source, cross platform, and supports software-in-the-loop simulation with popular flight controllers such as PX4 & ArduPilot and hardware-in-loop with PX4 for physically and visually realistic simulations. It is developed as an Unreal plugin that can simply be dropped into any Unreal environment. Similarly, we have an experimental release for a Unity plugin.
AirSim was conceived and created by Shital Shah with PX4 and hardware-in-loop code contributed by Chris Lovett.
Our goal is to develop AirSim as a platform for AI research to experiment with deep learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles. For this purpose, AirSim also exposes APIs to retrieve data and control vehicles in a platform independent way.
Check out the quick 1.5 minute demo
Drones in AirSim
Cars in AirSim
For more details, see the use precompiled binaries document.
View our detailed documentation on all aspects of AirSim.
If you have remote control (RC) as shown below, you can manually control the drone in the simulator. For cars, you can use arrow keys to drive manually.
AirSim exposes APIs so you can interact with the vehicle in the simulation programmatically. You can use these APIs to retrieve images, get state, control the vehicle and so on. The APIs are exposed through the RPC, and are accessible via a variety of languages, including C++, Python, C# and Java.
These APIs are also available as part of a separate, independent cross-platform library, so you can deploy them on a companion computer on your vehicle. This way you can write and test your code in the simulator, and later execute it on the real vehicles. Transfer learning and related research is one of our focus areas.