AutonomySim was created by Adam Erickson at Nervosys in July 2023 as a fork of an updated version of Microsoft AirSim, deprecated by Microsoft in 2017 in favor of its Azure cloud services. AutonomySim is a large-scale project reorganization and modernization effort. This effort includes adding artificial intelligence (AI) modeling capabilities, migrating to Unreal Engine 5.3, dropping support for Unity, Gazebo, and ROS1, switching from Command/Batch files to PowerShell on Windows, as well as cleaning up the directory structure, filenames, and code.
AirSim was originally created in 2016 by Shital Shah at Microsoft. Shital authored the physics engine, multirotor model, car model, environment models, sensor models, all Unreal Engine related code, APIs, SimpleFlight firmware, computer vision components, documentation, et cetera.
Chris Lovett at Microsoft, another original author, contributed the MavLink library, PX4-related components, the Settings system, build system, several important bug fixes, et cetera.
Alon Faraj and Tyler Fedrizzi at Codex Labs contributed a series of updates in 2022-2023, including patches to support Unreal Engine 5.
A list of previous contributors can be found here.