mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

AirSim: High-Fidelity Visual and Physical Simulation for Autonomous Vehicles

arXiv 1705.05065 ↗First posted 15 May 2017cs.RO cs.AI cs.CVcited by 517

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 54 in End-to-end autonomous driving, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Developing and testing algorithms for autonomous vehicles in real world is an expensive and time consuming process. Also, in order to utilize recent advances in machine intelligence and deep learning we need to collect a large amount of annotated training data in a variety of conditions and environments. We present a new simulator built on Unreal Engine that offers physically and visually realistic simulations for both of these goals. Our simulator includes a physics engine that can operate at a high frequency for real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations with support for popular protocols (e.g. MavLink). The simulator is designed from the ground up to be extensible to accommodate new types of vehicles, hardware platforms and software protocols. In addition, the modular design enables various components to be easily usable independently in other projects. We demonstrate the simulator by first implementing a quadrotor as an autonomous vehicle and then experimentally comparing the software components with real-world flights.

Key facts. Cited by 517 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 15 May 2017.

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Citing papers per year: 2018: 3; 2019: 1; 2020: 1; 2021: 54; 2022: 79; 2023: 74; 2024: 104; 2025: 117; 2026: 84.

517 papers.

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  8. 2022Practical Stereo Matching via Cascaded Recurrent Network with Adaptive Correlationcited by 197
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  10. 2023NeuRAD: Neural Rendering for Autonomous Drivingcited by 146
  11. 2023LLM4Drive: A Survey of Large Language Models for Autonomous Drivingcited by 136
  12. 20223D Object Detection for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 132
38 more
  1. 2023AerialVLN: Vision-and-Language Navigation for UAVscited by 117
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  3. 2024textitS3Gaussian: Self-Supervised Street Gaussians for Autonomous Drivingcited by 105
  4. 2024Towards learning-based planning:The nuPlan benchmark for real-world autonomous drivingcited by 103
  5. 2024Editable Scene Simulation for Autonomous Driving via Collaborative LLM-Agentscited by 91
  6. 2021VISTA 2.0: An Open, Data-driven Simulator for Multimodal Sensing and Policy Learning for Autonomous Vehiclescited by 81
  7. 2023Collaboration Helps Camera Overtake LiDAR in 3D Detectioncited by 81
  8. 2025Cosmos-Drive-Dreams: Scalable Synthetic Driving Data Generation with World Foundation Modelscited by 80
  9. 2018Vision-based Navigation with Language-based Assistance via Imitation Learning with Indirect Interventioncited by 77
  10. 2023Milestones in Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Vehicles: Survey of Surveyscited by 75
  11. 2021Learning to Fly -- a Gym Environment with PyBullet Physics for Reinforcement Learning of Multi-agent Quadcopter Controlcited by 68
  12. 2024A Survey on Autonomous Driving Datasets: Statistics, Annotation Quality, and a Future Outlookcited by 65
  13. 2024NeuroNCAP: Photorealistic Closed-loop Safety Testing for Autonomous Drivingcited by 61
  14. 2023Generalized Video Anomaly Event Detection: Systematic Taxonomy and Comparison of Deep Modelscited by 59
  15. 2023Drive Anywhere: Generalizable End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Multi-modal Foundation Modelscited by 59
  16. 2023How Simulation Helps Autonomous Driving:A Survey of Sim2real, Digital Twins, and Parallel Intelligencecited by 55
  17. 2024LidarDM: Generative LiDAR Simulation in a Generated Worldcited by 53
  18. 2022STPLS3D: A Large-Scale Synthetic and Real Aerial Photogrammetry 3D Point Cloud Datasetcited by 52
  19. 2022DTA: Physical Camouflage Attacks using Differentiable Transformation Networkcited by 51
  20. 2021R3LIVE: A Robust, Real-time, RGB-colored, LiDAR-Inertial-Visual tightly-coupled state Estimation and mapping packagecited by 49
  21. 2022Aerial Vision-and-Dialog Navigationcited by 48
  22. 2025UAVs Meet LLMs: Overviews and Perspectives Toward Agentic Low-Altitude Mobilitycited by 48
  23. 2023NeRF-LiDAR: Generating Realistic LiDAR Point Clouds with Neural Radiance Fieldscited by 44
  24. 2024Embodied-RAG: General Non-parametric Embodied Memory for Retrieval and Generationcited by 44
  25. 2021safe-control-gym: a Unified Benchmark Suite for Safe Learning-based Control and Reinforcement Learning in Roboticscited by 42
  26. 2023All for One, and One for All: UrbanSyn Dataset, the third Musketeer of Synthetic Driving Scenescited by 40
  27. 2025AerialMegaDepth: Learning Aerial-Ground Reconstruction and View Synthesiscited by 39
  28. 2024SGD: Street View Synthesis with Gaussian Splatting and Diffusion Priorcited by 36
  29. 2025TartanGround: A Large-Scale Dataset for Ground Robot Perception and Navigationcited by 35
  30. 2024A survey of synthetic data augmentation methods in computer visioncited by 34
  31. 2021Pylot: A Modular Platform for Exploring Latency-Accuracy Tradeoffs in Autonomous Vehiclescited by 33
  32. 2021Vision-Language Navigation: A Survey and Taxonomycited by 33
  33. 20213DB: A Framework for Debugging Computer Vision Modelscited by 31
  34. 2022EVIMO2: An Event Camera Dataset for Motion Segmentation, Optical Flow, Structure from Motion, and Visual Inertial Odometry in Indoor Scenes with Monocular or Stereo Algorithmscited by 31
  35. 2025CityEQA: A Hierarchical LLM Agent on Embodied Question Answering Benchmark in City Spacecited by 31
  36. 2025UAV-ON: A Benchmark for Open-World Object Goal Navigation with Aerial Agentscited by 31
  37. 2022Behavioral Intention Prediction in Driving Scenes: A Surveycited by 30
  38. 2024Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Surveycited by 30

50 most cited of 517 All 517 (JSON)