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AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

github.com

41–50 of 57 posts

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#41
I've been using LiftOff (https://store.steampowered.com/app/410340/Liftoff_FPV_Drone_...) to test my drone handling skills in a simulated environment for a while. It's remarkably accurate and allows for custom drone models to be downloaded that match up very well the the handling of the real drone in question.

Weather, wind etc. are all taken into account.

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's good that it's open source then ;)

Good that autonomous driving companies won't pay me for my contribution to the software that underpins their R&D?

One perk of it being open source is that you can take your payment in "benefiting the world" instead of cash. You're given the platform to improve it if you want; expecting some other kind of compensation for addressing your own complaint doesn't seem realistic.

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#43
post #37

That looks interesting, but I wonder how accurate the flight behavior is when they are not including any atmospheric dynamics. The wind in the atmospheric boundary layer is characterized by strong semi-random fluctuations that arise from the turbulent interactions of the air with the surface. These fluctuations occur on scales both larger and smaller than a drone, so they should have a significant effect on its aerod…

Aerodynamic simulation is a really tough problem to take on. I'd venture to guess that it's in part due to not having a complete set of theories/equations around fluid dynamics. From what I hear, X-Plane comes really close to this. But yes, skill-transfer aside, I'd guess any airborne vehicle trained in a simulator that lacks environmental effects, ground effects, induced drag effects...etc in its physics calculation is not going to perform well in the real-world.

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#44
post #25
post #24

Slightly worrying that the car simulation doesn't appear to have any cyclists or pedestrians.

Or pictures of people on the sides of sprinter vans. Or bikes on trailers on the backs of cars. Or pickup trucks stuffed to the gills with Lime scooters. Or...

Yeah and in the car video on https://microsoft.github.io/AirSim/, they have the car driving on the wrong side of a barricade on a bus only lane. :(

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#46
post #15

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[…

This is really cool! Nice work. Do you remember how you went about creating the original receipt generator? I'd be really interested in this kind of stuff without any ML/DL.

Not OP but I was just looking through their repo and I've done something similar in the past for a different application. We both used Blender for generating the rendered synthetic data. Blender has a really simple python API that was originally made for simple scripts but you can run it in a headless mode. You start with a base scene that has all of your objects and use the api to randomly generate samples and render them out to a file.

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#47

I just downloaded this last weekend! I’m trying to find a good simulator where I can import models generated with photogrammetry. I’ve been using a cell phone camera and OpenSfM + OpenMVS to make 3D models of real world environments, and I want to be able to run them in sim. I see this is built on Unity. In the past I tried UnrealEngine but it was such a big mess of software for simple RL tasks. I’ll have to see if U…

This sounds super cool! Can you say a bit more about your OpenSfM + OpenMVS stack? I've been idly interested in building 3d models from cell phone video for a while.

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#48
post #45

Any companies working on this?

(Disclosure: I work at one)

There’s a few working specifically on simulating the autonomous vehicle domain. air sim is unique because you can do both ground and air. From the business side of things I’ve seen enterprises find it as a good way of proving the value of simulation. The company I work for CVEDIA, develops SynCity which we use both for simulating autonomous systems and generating training data for object recognition and classification tasks.

Re: AirSim: open-source simulator for autonomous vehicles

#49

I just downloaded this last weekend! I’m trying to find a good simulator where I can import models generated with photogrammetry. I’ve been using a cell phone camera and OpenSfM + OpenMVS to make 3D models of real world environments, and I want to be able to run them in sim. I see this is built on Unity. In the past I tried UnrealEngine but it was such a big mess of software for simple RL tasks. I’ll have to see if U…

This is quite cool, why cameras only though? Intel realsense, ultrasound? Are you avoiding them due to cost?
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