Project SkySim, Part 1: The Case for a Drone Simulator That Runs in Your Browser
I build drone autonomy software for a living. Vision-only navigation, perception, control, the kind of work where you spend most of your day not flying a real aircraft, because crashing a real aircraft into a wall to test a bad line of code is expensive and slow. Simulation is where the actual work happens.
And that is exactly where I keep hitting the same wall.
Here is the honest sequence for a beginner who wants to test a drone control algorithm in 2026. First, install Ubuntu, then dual-boot it, or fight a virtual machine. Then install ROS, and the specific ROS distribution that matches the specific simulator version you picked. Then compile a game engine, or download several gigabytes of pre-built environments. Then chase GPU drivers. Then, somewhere around hour three or hour thirty, if nothing broke, you finally get to write the one function you actually cared about.
Most...
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