AirSim is a simulator for drones (and soon other vehicles) built on Unreal Engine. Its open source, cross platform and supports hardware-in-loop with popular platforms such as PixHawk for physically and visually realistic simulations. It is developed as Unreal plugin that can be just dropped in to any environment you want. It also exposes APIs so you can retrieve sensor data, ground truth and camera images from the simulator as well as send control commands to the vehicle. Our goal is to develop AirSim as a platform for AI research where we can experiment with deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms for autonomous vehicles.
This project is under heavy development. While we are working through our backlog of new features and known issues, we welcome contributions! Our current release is in beta and our APIs are subject to change.
Currently, to get the best experience you will need PixHawk or compatible device and a RC controller. These enables so called "hardware-in-loop simulation" that provides more realistic experience. Follow these instructions on how to get it, set it up and other alternatives.
There are two ways to get AirSim working on your machine.
We recommand option 2 if you are want to use the Unreal plugin in your own environment.
#Linux All our current code is cross-platform and CMake enabled. We are working on to iron out few rough edges for our official Linux build and expect to release it around next two weeks. Meanwhile, please feel free to playaround on other opearting systems and report any issues. We had love to make AirSim available on as many platforms as possible.