Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#11

Post by [deleted] »

grenoire wrote: post #4
therobot24 wrote: post #3

looked at using airsim a few months ago to replace a product we'd been using for some time, problem was the actual vehicle dynamics simulation capabilities were subpar

Did not do a code review but I would not be surprised if they were using Unreal's default vehicle simulation; which, as you noted, is indeed sub-par. It's honestly a very challenging task to get vehicle physics to accurately replicate real cars, and the systems which are out there (commonly used by manufacturers to make advertisement renderings) are proprietary and expensive .

[deleted]

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#12

Post by gexla »

I just ran across Real Engine looking for Architectural Visualization software (note that Twinmotion is free until Nov!) This is an amazing space which I imagine will explode in variety of application, especially once VR goes mainstream.

Are there any open source alternatives which even come close?

I wonder if I would attract attention if I were to upload a rendering of Saudi oil infrastructure for drone simulation. ;)

Can we use this thing as a simulation for shooting drones out of the sky? This could be an interesting massively multiplayer research project creating an arms race between attackers and defenders.

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#13

Post by mey »

grenoire wrote: post #4
therobot24 wrote: post #3

looked at using airsim a few months ago to replace a product we'd been using for some time, problem was the actual vehicle dynamics simulation capabilities were subpar

Did not do a code review but I would not be surprised if they were using Unreal's default vehicle simulation; which, as you noted, is indeed sub-par. It's honestly a very challenging task to get vehicle physics to accurately replicate real cars, and the systems which are out there (commonly used by manufacturers to make advertisement renderings) are proprietary and expensive .

There is a physical car designed to be repainted (like a motion capture actor) in CGI. It solves physics by using actual physics.

http://www.themill.com/portfolio/3002/the-blackbird%C2%AE

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#14

Post by akoumis »

therobot24 wrote: post #3

looked at using airsim a few months ago to replace a product we'd been using for some time, problem was the actual vehicle dynamics simulation capabilities were subpar

Airsim also has poor facilities for stepped simulation needed for many RL algorithms (e.g. insert control, advance simulator by 30ms, observe state, repeat). It looks like this is still being worked on: https://github.com/microsoft/AirSim/issues/600

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#15

Post by daenz »

Super cool. I've always been a big fan of generating synthetic training data. As long as you can degrade/distort the data to match real world conditions, you can have your cake and eat it to: accurate inputs with perfect automated labels.

At my last job, we read the contents of receipts and parsed them for purchase information. I was really interested in working there, so I built a docker-based CGI receipt-generator[0] that mimicked real-world conditions of a receipt captured with a camera phone. After getting the job, I expanded it to provide the perfect labelled data of bounding box and character[1]. I then used this data to train custom TensorFlow models.

0. https://github.com/amoffat/metabrite-receipt-tests

1. https://i.imgur.com/gkdnAkt.jpg

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#16

Post by LyndsySimon »

In theory, could I use this (or something like it) to develop algorithms for controlling autonomous vehicles (aerial, ground, and/or aquatic), then if I ever get my experimentation to the point that I’m interested in doing so, building the vehicle itself and deploying it with a reasonable degree of confidence that it would actually work?

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#17

Post by jafingi »

LyndsySimon wrote: post #16

In theory, could I use this (or something like it) to develop algorithms for controlling autonomous vehicles (aerial, ground, and/or aquatic), then if I ever get my experimentation to the point that I’m interested in doing so, building the vehicle itself and deploying it with a reasonable degree of confidence that it would actually work?

There would be a reality gap, going from simulation to real world. Good read: https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/closing-simulation-to-real...

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#19

Post by jcims »

jafingi wrote: post #17
LyndsySimon wrote: post #16

In theory, could I use this (or something like it) to develop algorithms for controlling autonomous vehicles (aerial, ground, and/or aquatic), then if I ever get my experimentation to the point that I’m interested in doing so, building the vehicle itself and deploying it with a reasonable degree of confidence that it would actually work?

There would be a reality gap, going from simulation to real world. Good read: https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/10/closing-simulation-to-real...

AKA 'sim2real' gap for googling purposes.

related: https://lilianweng.github.io/lil-log/2019/05/05/domain-rando...

Post reply on HN