Show HN: Open-Source AI Racing Harness

[danAtElodin]

Hi I'm Dan from Elodin, making an open source real-time capable flight software simulation.

For AI Grand Prix contestants, the wait for the Round 1 virtual qualifier simulation has been grueling.

If you’re competing, check out our simulation harness to tide you over, built to match the published competition constraints and message format. It runs against real Betaflight, which we learned requires at least 1000 sensor samples per second to run real-time correctly.

The competition warranted introducing a new feature to generate the camera sensor directly in the simulation loop. Typically people connect to Unreal or similar game engine to create a camera sensor, which works well but is very heavy. For the simple needs of this challenge, creating sample directly in the loop is very handy and easy to use. Happy to hear your feedback on this! While it's not fancy looking currently, it uses the Rust Bevy game engine, which should allow us to improve the visual fidelity quickly.

We all should easily be able to shift our implementation to the published competition sim once it lands. Hope you enjoy and good luck!

[ok_dad]

If you participate in this competition you’re effectively giving free research to a weapons company who will use it to improve their killer drones. I’m not judging but that’s what this is. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am.

I only say this because technologists sometimes don’t think about the reasons behind things, they just see a fun problem to solve.

[knollimar]

Relevant blog post someone threw last time something like this got posted: https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

[danAtElodin]

I appreciate it, I'd not seen this before, great perspective

[danAtElodin]

So I got a chance to watch this fully through, and fun fact, I was in Iraq as an Armored Cavalry officer when this technology was deployed with the embedded Seal team and special forces unit we supported. I'm very sorry this engineer clearly regrets being what he regards as tricked into developing the technology, but from my experiences, his guilt is misplaced. That technology saved a ton of lives, and allowed us to track and apprehend some really bad dudes. I was the operations center battle captain at the time, so I had a really high degree of knowledge of the information being used to decide on targeting, and it was 100% professional. Huge dossiers on mass pitt style murders, with video evidence, that was required before a target was actioned on, after months of planning. I have zero regrets; this developer should be very proud of his work. I acknowledge that in theory some bad actors can abuse technology for ill, and this current admin definitely disappoints me constantly. But I'm glad we had this tech when we needed it, so as many of my friends could come home as did. We had over a thousand casualties in Iraq over my two deployments, and my unit was 100% all about helping pursue stability and local governance, no nefarious story telling I ever saw. Was it worth all of those lives and money? I'd say no, but only because we as Americans and our system of government doesn't allow for long term thinking, planning, and persistence required to make generational change happen.

[ok_dad]

Very relevant thank you

[danAtElodin]

Anduril is far ahead of anything we can produce here for this competition, but it's certainly a great method for them to identify potential talent who can bring needed skills to their team, hence the grand prize of a job offer. The terms of the competition is they get to use any submission for marketing purposes but the IP remains with the participants. Personally I'm in the camp that the world has bad guys, and they are building technology too. Smartest to make sure yours is better. Professionally we only work on defensive systems, which are in high demand these days.

[ok_dad]

We can defend from drones without building our own autonomous drone killing machines. The real danger here is that we have bad guys at home who will use this tech on us if we give them the chance, so personally I’m opposed to building it. Not like I can do anything other than comment here and vote.

I’m really not judging anyone who does, there’s a lot of nuance here that honestly makes it hard to argue you’re wrong or I’m right in this discussion.

[danAtElodin]

Completely agree, details matter for sure. I just returned from a visit to Odessa Ukraine, and observed a maelstrom of drone on drone combat right outside my hotel window to booms and shaking glass. Those experiences make me want to help defend against the indiscriminate strikes however I can. But I concede there is danger in providing the tools.

[folkrav]

> Personally I'm in the camp that the world has bad guys, and they are building technology too. Smartest to make sure yours is better.

I get the idea, but it is also the same argument that has fueled the nuclear arms race that stuck all of us in this permanent launch-on-warning, mutually assured destruction situation.

[fragmede]

As push comes to shove, I'd prefer our drones are better than Iran/Russia's.

[ok_dad]

The only reason we’re in this mess with Iran is a dumbass president; as for Russia, same thing. I’m not gonna reward the military industrial complex just because they backed a moron.

On topic: I would prefer we research defenses for drones instead of drones themselves.

[fragmede]

I would prefer our drone defenses actually work against real drones, and that only happens by having real opponents. Or do you not believe in red teaming?

[ok_dad]

That isn’t real opponents, it’s useful for training but you don’t need actual drones to red team. I don’t know how many times I had to use my imagination in the military when we were fighting paper opponents that were non existent but we had to maneuver and walk through processes as if we had a missile inbound. Or those situations where we had a real target but we weren’t allowed to actually shoot at it because it was reserved for another unit to actually shoot at.

[zamadatix]

Red teaming is fine but we already have the actual red team drones to make sure they work against.

[danAtElodin]

I totally agree, very interested anti-drone defenses. You can actually use much of this to model and simulate the drones you want to stop just as well.

[xspad3s]

Does the starter kit include a simple baseline agent (like a basic line-follower) that I can run immediately to see how the simulator works?

[danAtElodin]

the included baseline just demonstrates that the Betaflight controller will indeed move to the hard-coded center positions of each gate. So the basic first solver task would be to replace that with a CV or ML inference based approach. We plan to add another demo solver into the sample set that shows this next, currently in progress.

[coin_artist]

Looks cool! But why not just use Gazebo? Or Issac?

[danAtElodin]

Both great tools, optimized for slightly different needs. Gazebo is great for simulation and testing of higher level control, or for simulation that doesn't require 1000hz sensor simulation rate. Nvidia Isaac focuses on ML model training workflows, not ideal for interacting directly with your flight software for flight testing your code before you fly. This aims to be software CI/CD for your drone builds.

[ParkRanger]

I'm sure this will only be used for "racing"

[FionaZhu]

Wow.That's looks great.

[danAtElodin]

Thanks I appreciate it!

[AbhisumatK]

Wow! Looks awesome!

[danAtElodin]

Thanks!