Show HN: Open-Source AI Racing Harness

Summary

‍Overview‍Today we're open-sourcing a practice rig for Anduril's AI Grand Prix (a $500K autonomous drone-race competition) so contestants and anyone else curious can start writing autopilot code against a working stack now, before the official Virtual Qualifier 1 simulator drops: github.com/elodin-sys/ai-grand-prix. It's open source, runs on macOS and Linux, and the whole setup is uv sync plus a 5-minute Betaflight build. (WSL should be workable too)‍The Elodin Journey‍The path here was longer than we expected. I came into this from the games side. One of my earlier jobs was working on The Sims 4, which (whatever else you think of it) does a serious amount of simulation under the hood: emergent behavior, deterministic-ish replay, content pipelines, an editor good enough to ship to gamers, i.e. non-engineers. That polish and joy of use was missing in aerospace tooling, where most teams I talked to were stitching together MATLAB/Simulink + Gazebo + a homegrown Python harness and praying it held together. We started Elodin a few years ago thinking we could close some of that gap, and it turned out to be a much bigger job than any of us understood at the time. Most of the last couple of years has been us sitting next to customers (drone, satellite, missiles, etc), grounding the simulator in real flight data, finding the missing 20% of features that turn a demo into something a flight-software team relies on, and slowly converging on a stack that gets a useful sim up in hours instead of weeks.‍- traditional quadcopter simulation development in MathWorks Simulink‍What we ended up with, roughly, is a Rust ECS + JIT-compiled physics core (nox) with Python bindings, a 3D editor that connects to a time-series telemetry DB (elodin-db) over TCP and live-binds GLB models, plots, and camera feeds to ECS components, and a small process runner (s10) so the same Python entry point can spawn whatever else the sim needs (flight controller, render server, external estimator). The inter...