Autonomous flying agents – or flying robots – may seem like the stuff of sci-fi to the average person, but to Dr. Ashish Kapoor, Principal Researcher and Research Manager of the Aerial Informatics and Robotics Group at Microsoft Research, they’re much closer to science than to fiction. And, having built – and flight tested – his own airplane, complete with state-of-the-art avionics designed to run AI and ML algorithms, he has the street cred – or should we say flight cred – to prove it.

Today, Dr. Kapoor talks about how cutting-edge machine learning techniques are empowering a new generation of autonomous vehicles, and tells us all about AirSim, an innovative platform that’s helping bridge the simulator-to-reality gap, paving the way for safer, more robust real-world AI systems of all kinds