Exploration of AirSim using C and Rust in the Context of SafetyCritical Systems

Abstract: AirSim is a new simulator developed as a plugin for the Unreal Engine, aiming to be a useful tool aiding the development and testing of algorithms for autonomous vehicles. Due to AirSim still being in its infancy there is little to none research available of its possibilities or detailed guidelines and tutorials on how to use its APIs.Rust is a new systems programming language with the purpose of being safe, practical and concurrent which through design choices can solve some of the major drawbacks of the C programming language such as memory leaks, thread management, and segmentation faults.Researching the features of AirSim and its different ways of communicating, we determine the possibility of implementing a custom flight controller in Rust and C able to control a drone in the simulator and evaluate the capabilities of Rust compared to C. This is conducted by reading available documentation for AirSim, studying the source code and learning about the communication protocols used by AirSim.This thesis results in an implementation of a custom flight controller in Rust and C that controls a drone in AirSim using a communication protocol named MAVLink which enables fine-grained control of the motors. The conclusion made about the comparison of Rust and C is that both languages were able to implement the safety-critical functionality of the flight controller and that Rust provided capabilities which could be useful when developing safety-critical systems.