microsoft/airsim

AirSim is an open-source simulator for drones, cars, and other autonomous vehicles, built as a plugin for the Unreal Engine game engine (with an experimental Unity version as well). It was originally created by Microsoft Research in 2017 to help AI researchers experiment with deep learning, computer vision, and reinforcement learning in a realistic 3D environment without needing physical hardware. The simulator supports software-in-the-loop testing (running flight control software against the simulator) and hardware-in-the-loop testing (connecting a real flight controller board to the simulated environment). You can control vehicles manually using a remote controller or keyboard, or write code in C++, Python, C#, or Java that communicates with the simulator through a programming interface to collect images, read sensor data, or send movement commands. There is also a dedicated Computer Vision mode where you move cameras through a scene and capture depth maps, surface normal images, or object segmentation data, useful for training machine vision models. Note that this original repository has been archived and is no longer receiving updates. Microsoft has moved development to a new commercial product called Project AirSim, described as an end-to-end platform focused on the needs of the aerospace industry. The archived code remains publicly accessible for reference.