Testing AI Methods With FlightGear

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Testing AI Methods With FlightGear

Posted by timothy on Tuesday April 3, 2012 @04:06AM from the crash-as-often-as-you-want dept.

mikejuk writes "The open source flight simulator Flight Gear is great fun but it can also be used for serious research. Suppose you want to develop a drone that can roam the seas and spot debris so that ships can be directed to it and pick it up. It's a good idea, but how do you test your methods? The obvious way is to take to the sea and fly a drone over real debris and see what happens. It uses a lot of fuel and generates a lot of sea sickness. Why not just fly a simulated drone over a simulated sea and save the sea sickness? This is what Curtis Olson, project manager at FlightGear and he explains how to get OpenCV to use the simulator as if it was a camera."

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Tacos by SCPRedMage · 2012-04-03 04:08 · Score: 3, Funny

But can it simulate taco delivery drones?

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Drones get seasick? by Dynedain · 2012-04-03 04:10 · Score: 4, Informative

The obvious way is to take to the sea and fly a drone over real debris and see what happens. It uses a lot of fuel and generates a lot of sea sickness.
If it's a drone, how is there sea sickness?

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1. Re:Drones get seasick? by kidgenius · 2012-04-03 04:11 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  They are implying that you are controlling the drone from a boat on the sea. Thus you would get sea-sick.
2. Re:Drones get seasick? by Richard_at_work · 2012-04-03 05:15 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  You would still have to "seed" the search area with identifiable items so that your test is proper, and clear the search area for the "no results" outcome, rather than simply relying on whatever is drifting around when you got there.
  You know, actually engineer a proper test environment...
3. Re:Drones get seasick? by clolson · 2012-04-03 05:38 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  There are really really expensive drones that can fly for days on end, but the folks that typically are interested in environmental issues and searching for marine debris (even NOAA.gov) have trouble affording to buy them. From a practical and economic standpoint it makes much more sense to focus on smaller, less expensive drones that operate near the ship (and there for would be launched from the ship and recovered back to the ship.) Also consider a ship that travels at most about 10 kts. If you fly more than 20 nm from the ship and spot something, that's two hours of ship time to drive over and check it out.
Re:Yawn... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-04-03 04:11 · Score: 2, Funny

To mars. You should join us. We have punch.
What debris? by Mattygfunk1 · 2012-04-03 04:14 · Score: 2

What are we looking for here? Remnants of an aircraft or ship? What other debris is out there?

Am I wrong in thinking that leaving a busted up craft to sink isn't the worst crime? It's not much pollution. Is this to help looking for bodies?
1. Re:What debris? by DrData99 · 2012-04-03 04:24 · Score: 2
  
  There is a LOT of debris from the tsunami in Japan, and some of it is quite large and not sinking. http://www.torontosun.com/2012/03/26/ghost-ship-off-bc-heralds-arrival-of-tsunami-debris
2. Re:What debris? by gman003 · 2012-04-03 04:32 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Overboard shipping containers. Search-and-rescue (aka find the bodies). Security (if it can spot debris, it can spot actual ships). Oil slicks, possibly.
  Also, if there's something *continually* spitting out debris or something similar, tracking it down to stop it would be important.
3. Re:What debris? by Nyder · 2012-04-03 04:49 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  ...
  Also, if there's something *continually* spitting out debris or something similar, tracking it down to stop it would be important.
  That "something" is called man.
  
  --
  Be seeing you...
4. Re:What debris? by dcw3 · 2012-04-03 04:59 · Score: 2
  
  ...
  Also, if there's something *continually* spitting out debris or something similar, tracking it down to stop it would be important.
  That "something" is called man.
  What, fish don't shit in the sea?
  
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Re:Cool, but... by fredrated · 2012-04-03 04:38 · Score: 2

Surely they can think of a better reason to research this other than flying around looking for debris.
We all know the 'better' reason: to look for people to kill. However, looking for people to kill would upset some people, so we call it 'looking for debris'.
Re:Cool, but... by Baloroth · 2012-04-03 04:41 · Score: 2

We all know the 'better' reason: to look for people to kill. However, looking for people to kill would upset some people, so we call it 'looking for debris'.
Exactly. "Debris". The fact that they aren't debris yet is just semantics.

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Simulation by MisterMidi · 2012-04-03 04:55 · Score: 2

Let me get this right. They're using a simulated drone flying in simulated air over a simulated ocean to develop algorithms to look for simulated debris? I can see this work within the limits of the software models, but I don't think the real world cares about those limits.
1. Re:Simulation by pitchingchris · 2012-04-03 05:34 · Score: 2
  
  The world does not care about those limits, but at least you can test against trivial cases. You may need to tweak it in the field to fit the "real world" limits, but using the simulator should get you closer to a working model. Otherwise you are wasting money on fuel, possible crashes, and data processing. There's many steps that need to be tested before hitting the real world tests to make a complete system capable.
2. Re:Simulation by clolson · 2012-04-03 05:46 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  pitchingchris: exactly. No simulation is perfect, but is the simulation useful? If the simulation allows you to develop and test the bulk of your code in a comfortable environment, it may just be useful. No one wants to be in the hot seat chasing down a segfault while the ship is costing $20k per day just to idle and drift, and then you have a crew of 20-30 folks sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for your code to compile -- you are supposed to be flying and working. The other question to ask is how well do the simulation results translate to the real world. Here is where savvy engineering enters the picture. A savvy engineer will use the simulation as a *tool*. They will know and understand what aspects apply to the real world and what aspects don't. They will probably have already done some validation testing to help them determine how well the simulation does match up with the real world -- which parts they can trust and which parts they should ignore. You obviously wouldn't want to optimize your computer vision algorithm for FlightGear computer generated imagery, but you can see your algorithm running, you can test things like saving and loading video, communication with other hardware and software components, user interfaces -- there is a ton of stuff that you can do when you have a plausible simulation on your desk that you really don't want to be wasting your time doing at sea when you are borderline seasick and everything is 10x more difficult.
3. Re:Simulation by ceoyoyo · 2012-04-03 07:01 · Score: 2
  
  News flash for you - 150 and 250 are both greater than zero.
Excellent! by Rostin · 2012-04-03 05:01 · Score: 2

I find this article very satisfying because every time I see a story about robotics research where the main objective doesn't seem to be building robots but developing algorithms, I wonder why they wasted time and money building robots. Like, for instance, that research that made rounds in popular science articles a couple of years ago about robots that evolved the ability to lie. Why bother building and programming little robots to physically carry out the task of gathering "food", when the whole thing obviously could have been simulated?
1. Re:Excellent! by clolson · 2012-04-03 05:52 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Ultimately the point of robotics and AI is to accomplish some useful real world task. The question to ask is what is the best, fastest, most economical way to build a system? A UAV mishap could set a small program back by months and 10's of thousands or 100's of thousands of $$$ (or a whole lot more if you look at the flag ship military drones.) The point of the original flightgear.org article is to show an example of how it is possible to construct a simulated environment and then leverage that to accelerate the development of a complicated and tricky collection of software.
2. Re:Excellent! by clolson · 2012-04-03 07:15 · Score: 2
  
  Simulations are great for quick development, but at some point you need to move into the real world.
  Absolutely. The ideal situation would be to develop with simulated and real world testing together, comparing and validating your simulated results against your real world results. The original article isn't advocating for 100% in-a-vacuum simulation-based development, but rather trying to show how much you can do with carefully applied simulation -- using a cool, real-world project as an example. For what it's worth, this is just one small slice of a much larger marine debris effort that involves modeling and prediction based on satellite imagery, hours of close-in imagery captured from "manned" aircraft, as well as several at-sea tests of UAV's and UAV imagery. http://highseasghost.net/
Mod Parent Up by getto+man+d · 2012-04-03 05:59 · Score: 2

One of the best comments on this article so far. Algorithmic development and optimization is not a trivial subset of problems in active robotics research.
On this episode of FlightGear... by milbournosphere · 2012-04-03 06:00 · Score: 3, Funny

James wears a hat, Jeremy plays "a nice game of chess", and the Stig flies a drone! *cue intro music*
Only terrorists.. by nurb432 · 2012-04-03 06:00 · Score: 2

Well, you know the drill... How long before someone like the HSD goes out and tries to ban simulation software that has 'performance' beyond a certain level.
Much as they did with encryption decades ago, classifying them as munitions and legally limiting access to 'high quality encryption'. My old copy of windows 1.0 still has the export restriction sticker, due to encryption.

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Re:This isn't exactly new... by clolson · 2012-04-03 06:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

"There is nothing new under the sun." :-) However, within the context of FlightGear, the ability to draw realistic seascapes with waves, swells, sunglint, seafoam, ship wakes, etc. is relatively new. This graphical capability is what enables this particular use of FlightGear -- aiding the development and testing of AI/Computer Vision software for the ultimate purpose of automatically locating ocean debris. Paparazzi is good stuff, their hardware/software seems to often do well at UAV competitions. :-)
Re:This isn't exactly new... by Ogi_UnixNut · 2012-04-03 06:29 · Score: 2

Aaaaah, I see, that makes more sense, thanks for the explanation! :-)
And yeah I am very impressed with Paparazzi, I am actually surprised it doesn't get as much mention as other (arduino-based) drone systems. I was looking at developing a simple loitering drone with cameras, at the request of some companies and individuals who are interested in securing their compounds a bit better (getting a "birds-eye" view), and Paparazzi seems to be a good match for it. Now I just have to get off my arse and develop the hardware/flying machine, which is the hard part tbh.
Turns out getting a drone flying is easy, getting it to take stable pictures on the other hand, is a hell of a lot harder :-) I guess in this case the bigger the drone the less it will be affected by wind changes and turbulence