Microsoft is sharing some interesting tools with the open
source community today. Developers and researchers will be able to take
advantage of a new simulator that will let people test and train robots
and drones in a virtual environment to prepare them for moving around
the real world. A beta version of Microsoft’s research tool
is being made available free of charge on GitHub today through an open
source license. It’s just the latest in a line of tools and software
that Microsoft has made available to the open source community in recent
years.
While some simulators have existed to help test drone
paths and prepare devices for autonomous operations, Microsoft claims
its latest tool is far more advanced, and more accurately reflects the
navigation challenges of the real world. Engineers are already exploring
the possibility of training real-life action in virtual worlds, retrofitting games like GTA for this task. You can even test AI creations in Minecraft.
Microsoft is using the latest photorealistic technologies, so its
simulator will let you guide a drone over a realistic setting with
shadows and reflections.
“You can do a lot of experiments, and even if those experiments fail
they have very little cost in real life,” explains Ashish Kapoor, the
Microsoft researcher in charge of the project, in an interview with The Verge.
“In the real world it's extremely hard to explore all possible things,
however in simulation we have the luxury of trying out many different
things.”
Developers will be able to generate random environments
and crash drones accordingly, but Microsoft isn’t going to limit this to
just autonomous vehicles. The initial release of the tool, that Kapoor
admits is in its early days, will be geared towards “any kind of
autonomous vehicles,” but Kapoor believes it will even be able to help
with computer vision or even other data-driven machine learning systems
in the future.
“You can think of this as being a data generator,”
explains Kapoo. “If you have any kind of sensor, like a barometer or
even maybe say a laser or a radar, you can generate a lot of training
data for any of these sensing modalities. You can generate data that you
can in turn use to train.”
This idea of gathering training data is essential for
researchers to build the algorithms required for autonomous vehicles to
respond the correct way. This simulator isn’t designed to replace
real-world testing, but it will be used alongside that testing to
replicate scenarios hundreds or thousands of times.
Microsoft’s Aerial Informatics and Robotics Platform
includes support for DJI and MavLink drones, so developers don’t have
to write separate code to control these drones. Microsoft is planning to
add more tools to the platform in the future to help developers build
perception abilities and progress the safety of AI-powered autonomous
vehicles. You can find Microsoft’s simulator and tools over at the
company’s GitHub repository.
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