Drones and Artificial Intelligence
Drone Flying School: Project AirSim
An interesting experiment in AI for me and my AI assistant
Microsoft metaverse and Project AirSim
I know next to nothing about flying a drone although I’ve written a few articles about their use — and I spent a fair bit of time on Microsoft’s regular flight simulator when my joystick worked. Planes only.
Then today I read a story about Microsoft’s ‘metaverse’ being used for training autonomous drones.
Project AirSim uses the power of Azure to generate massive amounts of data for training AI models on exactly which actions to take at each phase of flight, from takeoff to cruising to landing. It will also offer libraries of simulated 3D environments representing diverse urban and rural landscapes as well as a suite of sophisticated pretrained AI models to help accelerate autonomy in aerial infrastructure inspection, last-mile delivery and urban air mobility.
According to the release announcement at the Farnborough Air Show, “use cases are almost limitless,” and Project AirSim can be used to train drones for inspections of infrastructure, mines, farmland, package delivery and even people delivery in flying taxis.
Flying taxis? Now there’s a thought, in a week when we had autonomous ground-level gridlock in San Francisco caused by crazy Cruise self-drivers. Was it a case of autonomous road rage?:
What would happen in the air?
Moving on (after gridlock):
“High-fidelity simulation was at the heart of AirSim, an earlier open-source project from Microsoft Research that is being retired but inspired today’s launch. AirSim was a popular research tool, but it required deep expertise in coding and machine learning.
Now, Microsoft has transformed that open-source tool into an end-to-end platform that allows Advanced Aerial Mobility (AAM) customers to more easily test and train AI-powered aircraft in simulated 3D environments.”
Do stupid things faster, as that old coffee sign said.
Seriously scary.
I wondered about this technology — Project Airsim — and wanted to know more, mainly because I’m seriously concerned about the dangers of un-trammelled AI and the potential for chaos in our world.
Pandora is already out of the box.
The ‘experiment’ I mention in the subtitle is not directly about Project Airsim, it’s about the use of AI and my idea was to use one of my AI writing assistants (today it’s Jasper) to dig into the subject.
The original AirSim was an open-source package released by Microsoft in 2017 and soon to be retired. Easy to do, after all Microsoft owns Github (a source of much developer unhappiness).
So, I set Jasper loose to do some research using the prompt ‘Project AirSim from Microsoft — how to train a drone to fly’.
Results
Microsoft’s Project Airsim is an open-source platform that allows you to train drones to fly in a simulated environment. This can be useful for developing and testing new drone technologies, or for simply practicing your flying skills. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to get started with Project Airsim and train a drone to fly autonomously.
First, you’ll need to download and install the Airsim software. You can find the latest release here.
The link wasn’t provided by my assistant, but you can get it at Sourceforge (20 July 2022). Remember it’s going to be retired — it says so in the MS press release. They just want more downloads, quickly, I think.
Jasper quickly provided me with detailed instructions on how to use AirSim, including waypoint setting and so forth. I’ll spare you 500 words on that.
My assistant did a pretty good job, at about the level I expected.
All I need now is an AI assistant to save me the trouble of programming the waypoints and running the flight plan.
And that is, of course, where AI breaks down. It can’t yet, and that’s got to be a good thing. Until a working brain interface comes along. Boy, I’m glad my days in this world are numbered.
Parameter change
And then I changed the prompt for Jasper. Just ‘Project AirSim’.
That gave me some more insight into the technology of the project and not the sales pitch (almost):
AirSim is a simulator for drones, cars and other vehicles built on the Unreal Engine. It is open-source, cross platform and supports hardware-in-loop with popular flight controllers such as Pixhawk for physically and visually realistic simulations. This makes it ideal for learning, developing and testing new algorithms.
AirSim also provides an SDK so that researchers and developers can write their own agents to fly in the simulator. The SDK exposes APIs to control how the vehicle behaves, access sensors data and even inspect internal state variables of the engine for debugging purposes.
We have been using AirSim extensively at Microsoft Research for our work on autonomous flying vehicles and we are releasing it today as an open source project under MIT license.
The Unreal Engine? That’s a good one. It seems there are a lot of them about.
Cities [like San Francisco] are plotted using Bing Maps and “other providers,” and pre-trained models in Project AirSim can be used as starting points to build more customized digital drone pilots. I hope the Cruise managers of the ’Frisco self drive cabs are reading this.
Simulations can be manually controlled by a pilot if required. I hope the Cruise managers of the ’Frisco self drive cabs are reading this. I know, I already said that.
Project AirSim is available today in limited preview. Interested customers can contact the Project AirSim team to learn more. [my bold]
You — or I — have to apply to get our hands on it. See what I mean about open source? It’s not really is it? They will capture your email at the very least, and I bet you also have to share data on Azure so that they ‘can improve the product’ and extend their training dataset by adding yours in.
Of course you will be accessing their scenarios on Azure anyway.
Or will you? I got Jasper to check for me. “Does Project AirSim access Azure data”.
Project AirSim does not currently have direct access to Azure data. However, it is possible to export data from Azure and import it into Project AirSim for use in simulations.
Still, I’m not sure I believe everything I read from Jasper — or Microsoft.
Not that I have either the time or the inclination to poke about with it or share my data. I was happy with just my joystick and a crt screen to watch.
Compatibility
Just for completeness I asked Jasper to dig out the dirty details for me while still in the same output page.
“What platform compatibility and operating system?”
Project Airsim is compatible with the Windows operating system. It can be run on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.
No surprises there. That’s me screwed. Well, not really. I dumped Windows almost a year back and went ‘non-proprietary’— i.e. Linux. Not a moment too soon. I got my life back, and my PCs.
So it’s back to my joystick and Flightgear.
Final thought: I guess that the US Air Force already has this kind of setup to train predator pilots? Now that’s what I want! Yes, I do recall that one of the 9/11 terrorist did some training on Microsoft Flight Simulator.
FWIW I have no affiliations with any links or products in this story and I certainly don’t (knowingly) use Microsoft software.
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