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I think the title is a bit misleading, it's thousands/millions of robots that try to learn flying (in simulation) and only one of them gets really good at it an
by andix 3y ago
I think the title is a bit misleading, it's thousands/millions of robots that try to learn flying (in simulation) and only one of them gets really good at it and is selected, then flashed onto the real quadcopter.
It is kind of impressive that it works that well. But also shows how much at the beginning machine learning still is. Theoretically a robot could learn flying in the same way as a human, without crashing million of times first. And the robot could learn much faster than a human does.
- theturtle32 3y agoNo human has ever, not even once, learned to perform the kind of flying that this neural network learned. Because the kind of flying involved here involves subtly - and simultaneously - tweaking the speed of four independent motors by infinitesimal amounts hundreds or more times per second in order to maintain stability. Get the speed of just one motor wrong for even a fraction of a second and you might end up overcorrecting, losing control, and suddenly flipping upside down. No human pilot in history has ever had to perform such a feat. There are certainly flying machines that humans do learn to pilot fairly manually, but a quadrotor is not one of them.
- andix 3y agoAbsolutely true, I guess we would need an experiment like that with a regular model air plane that also a human can learn to fly. I think the learning process for the AI would still be rather poor compared to a human. But also in other machine learning experiments the AIs need way more practice than humans. They just can do repetitions much faster, and clone themselves.
- scotty79 3y agoI'm not sure why you believe that humans are better at anything. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-drone-racing https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-drone-racing