Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform (Microsoft)
From the webpage:
Machine learning is becoming an increasingly important artificial intelligence approach to building autonomous and robotic systems. One of the key challenges with machine learning is the need for many samples — the amount of data needed to learn useful behaviors is prohibitively high. In addition, the robotic system is often non-operational during the training phase. This requires debugging to occur in real-world experiments with an unpredictable robot.
The Aerial Informatics and Robotics platform solves for these two problems: the large data needs for training, and the ability to debug in a simulator. It will provide realistic simulation tools for designers and developers to seamlessly generate the copious amounts of training data they need. In addition, the platform leverages recent advances in physics and perception computation to create accurate, real-world simulations. Together, this realism, based on efficiently generated ground truth data, enables the study and execution of complex missions that might be time-consuming and/or risky in the real-world. For example, collisions in a simulator cost virtually nothing, yet provide actionable information for improving the design.
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Open source simulator from Microsoft for drones.
How very cool!
Imagine training your drone to search for breaches of the Dakota Access pipeline.
Or how to react when it encounters hostile drones.
Enjoy!