Testing Drone Autonomy Shouldn't Require a Drone

The title of this article is why I ended up building an open-source drone simulator that runs in a browser tab, and everything that silently broke on the way there.

SkySim Demo

We are living in an era of the beginning of intelligent autonomous vehicle systems, and drones play a crucial part in this. But there's a specific kind of dread that comes with testing autonomy code on a real drone. You've got a new obstacle-avoidance tweak, you're fairly sure it's right, and the only way to know is to walk outside, arm a machine with four spinning blades, and hope your "fairly sure" holds up before it meets a tree. Every iteration costs setup time, battery cycles, airspace, and the low background hum of what if this is the run that breaks something expensive.

So, I kept thinking about this while spending time on my research on drone autonomy....

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