Game of Drones: A NeurIPS 2019 Competition
Quickstart
Unreal Environments
This competition marks the advent of a new release process for AirSim, in which we have separated out the AirSim plugin from environment content. Instead of having a series of individual executables for each environment, we have compacted all of the relevant AirSim content and API into a single binary (AirSimExe
).
Unreal environments containing race courses are released as separate downloadable content (DLC) packages, in the form of .pak
files, which can be loaded and unloaded into the main binary as needed.
Downloading AirSimExe and Unreal Environments
- Navigate to the releases page.
- Download the latest Windows or Linux
AirSim.zip
. - Download your desired environments (pakfiles) -
Building99.pak
/SoccerField.pak
/ZhangJiaJie.pak
. - Move the environment pakfile into
AirSim/AirSimExe/Content/Paks
. - The contents in the environment pakfile will now be linked to your AirSim binary!
Running the Executable
-
Linux
- Open a terminal window,
cd
toAirSim/
directory, and enter the following command:./AirSimExe.sh -windowed
- Open a terminal window,
-
Windows
- Navigate to the
AirSim/
directory, and double-clickrun.bat
- Navigate to the
AirSim API
To control your drone and get information from the environment, you will need the airsimneurips
API, which is accessible via Python.
Installation
- To install the Python API for the Neurips competition, please use:
Corollary: Do not do a
pip install airsimneurips
pip install airsim
, as we will have a few custom APIs specific to this competition. - Resources
- airsimneurips API doc
- AirSim upstream API and examples
(Note that this is not used in the competition, however is a good learning resource)
Changing Environments
There are two ways to swap between levels, either via AirSIm API or by the UI menu.
-
API
- We have added a new API
simLoadLevel(level_name="MainMenu")
to change Unreal environments on the fly.
Possible values forlevel_name
are :"Soccer_Field_Easy"
,"Soccer_Field_Medium"
,"ZhangJiaJie_Medium"
,"Building99_Hard"
. Here's a quick snippet to iterate throught them all. Before trying this, please ensure you've downloaded the corresponding pak files from our releases page.
import airsimneurips as airsim client = airsim.MultirotorClient() client.confirmConnection() client.simLoadLevel('Soccer_Field_Easy') client.simLoadLevel('Soccer_Field_Medium') client.simLoadLevel('ZhangJiaJie_Medium') client.simLoadLevel('Building99_Hard')
- We have added a new API
-
UI Menu
- Press
F10
to toggle the level menu - Click your desired level. (Note: the UI lists all the pakfiles in the
AirSim/AirSimExe/Content/Paks
directory. Ensure you downloaded the pakfile, if you are not able to see a particular environment)
- Press
Baselines
- Plan and move on minimum jerk trajectory using gate ground truth poses:
- Generate an AirSim settings.json file
$ cd baselines; $ python generate_settings_file.py
- Start the AirSim Neurips binary, as explained above
- Run the code!
See all the baseline arguments here
$ python baseline_racer.py \ --enable_viz_traj \ --enable_plot_transform \ --planning_baseline_type all_gates_at_once \ --planning_and_control_api moveOnSpline \ --level_name ZhangJiaJie_Medium
List of Environments in Increasing Order of Difficulty
- Soccer Field: A simple outdoors environment with few obstacles, and an easy to follow course.
- ZhangJiaJie: A mountainous landscape based on a national park in the Hunan province of China.
- Building99: A tight race course designed inside one of Microsoft's very own buildings.
Questions
Please open a Github Issue on this repository (not AirSim) for any technical questions w.r.t. the Neurips competition.