Josh Riedy knew it wasn’t real – that he wasn’t actually hovering near the top of a wind turbine in North Dakota, hundreds of feet off the ground. But it didn’t matter when he looked down. His stomach still dropped as if he were on a rollercoaster.
The CEO of Airtonomy was inside a digital replica of a real wind farm at the time, trailing a simulated drone through virtual reality glasses as it inspected towering turbines. His North Dakota-based company has been using these hyper-realistic simulations to train autonomous aerial vehicles that are now inspecting wind farms, surveying wildlife and detecting leaks in oil tanks across the Midwest.
Image: https://news.microsoft.com/innovation-stories/microsoft-launches-project-airsim-an-end-to-end-platform-to-accelerate-autonomous-flight/
