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Stanford's "Autonomous" Helicopters Learn
An anonymous reader writes "Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by 'watching' other helicopters perform the same maneuvers. The result is an autonomous helicopter that can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own. The stunts are 'by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer controlled helicopter,' said Andrew Ng, the professor directing the research of graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter and Morgan Quigley. The dazzling airshow is an important demonstration of 'apprenticeship learning,' in which robots learn by observing an expert, rather than by having software engineers peck away at their keyboards in an attempt to write instructions from scratch.'" The title of the linked article uses the term "autonomous," but that's somewhat misleading. The copters can't fly on their own, but rather can duplicate complex maneuvers learned from a human pilot.
Remember those robot gunships in the Terminator movies? Yes, the they shot lasers and what not. Those things had humble beginnings.
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
They still are autonomous. Would you call people non-autonomous because they learn from other people?
DARPA had a project going on for awhile called UCAR, which was an unmanned autonomous combat helicopter. Unfortunately the war took all the money and DARPA had to cancel the competitions between Lockheed and Northrop.
Northrop currently has an unmanned helicopter called Firescout that has autonomously landed on a Navy ship while the ship was moving.
My point is that this type of work is nothing new.
It's actually considerably more difficult. Unlike your computer, the helicopter encounters different environmental conditions each time it flies, so that just blindly recording the controller inputs and replaying them will cause the helicopter to crash. The trick in apprenticeship learning is to learn the flying model used by the pilot, not just recording and replaying a macro.
From the 2nd paragraph of the article:
"The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own."
From kdawson's summary:
"The title of the linked article uses the term "autonomous," but that's somewhat misleading. The copters can't fly on their own, but rather can duplicate complex maneuvers learned from a human pilot."
How in any way do you come to that conclusion based upon the data in the story?
They CAN and DO fly by themselves. Out of the lab. In varying weather conditions. Constantly making adjustments for wind gusts, etc., none of which is being controlled by a human.
And then the wisecrack about their AI? It uses an algorithm to study commands sent to another helicopter, studies the results, figures out what the goal of the commands was, and is able to implement those goals, on its own, more accurately than the original human pilot. That's not a strong AI?
Can we please get some editors that understand what they are reading?
*From The Not What You Would Call Brilliant Editing Department
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
Exactly - that's where the AI comes in. It looks at numerous attempts of various tricks, notes the differences in the environmental variables and adjusts the controls wrt to the current conditions for the optimal execution. If anything it's more like, record 100 attempts, analyze and define a "good" routine, but also define good "exception handlers". I must say, I was pretty confused about what, if any, "watching" was involved - i.e. reflected-light-based vision. Pretty bad explanation, bordering on fail.