Microsoft brings the autonomous vehicle simulator AirSim to Unity

Back in 2017, Microsoft announced a new platform called AirSim by Microsoft Research designed to help drone developers easily build autonomous and robotic systems. This new Aerial Informatics and Robotics platform provided realistic simulation and tools for designers and developers to seamlessly generate the large amounts of training data they need. It makes use of the advancements in computation and graphics, incorporating physics and perception, to create accurate, real-world simulations. In late 2017, Microsoft expanded the tool to also help in the training of autonomous self-driving cars.

Microsoft today announced that it is bringing the autonomous vehicle simulator AirSim to Unity. AirSim takes advantage of Unity’s performant engine, easy to use C# development environment, and quality content from the Unity Asset Store. Unity’s machine learning initiative ML-Agents can also be integrated into AirSim’s capabilities for more experimentation.

“Our goal with AirSim on Unity is to help manufacturers and researchers advance autonomous vehicle AI and deep learning. Unity gives its OEM clients the ability to develop realistic virtual environments in a cost-efficient manner and new ways to experiment in the world of autonomous and deep learning,” said Ashish Kapoor, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research & AI.

AirSim on Unity is available now on GitHub.

Source: Microsoft, Unity