microsoft/AirSim

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

18424 stars · 4916 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

AirSim is an open-source simulator for drones and cars built on Unreal Engine (with an experimental Unity plugin), developed by Microsoft Research for AI research. It provides physically and visually realistic simulation with software/hardware-in-the-loop support for PX4 and ArduPilot, plus cross-platform APIs to control vehicles and retrieve sensor data.

Use cases

• simulate drones for reinforcement learning research
• test self-driving car algorithms in a virtual environment
• generate synthetic training images for computer vision
• software-in-the-loop simulation with PX4 or ArduPilot flight controllers
• control simulated vehicles programmatically via APIs
• experiment with deep learning for autonomous vehicles

When to choose

• you need a physically and visually realistic drone or car simulator for AI research
• you want SIL/HIL integration with PX4 or ArduPilot
• you need cross-platform simulation with programmatic APIs for data collection

When to avoid

• you need an actively maintained simulator - the repo is archived and no further updates are made
• you want a commercial-grade end-to-end aerial autonomy platform (consider Project AirSim instead)
• you need lightweight simulation without Unreal Engine dependencies

Facets

library · maturity abandoned

simulation machine-learning computer-vision reinforcement-learning simulation autonomous-vehicles robotics artificial-intelligence windows cpp cross-platform unreal-engine drones simulator self-driving-car px4 unity linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="microsoft/AirSim")