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Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first
- IshKebab 1y agoSo is the processing happening on the drone? Presumably not...
- itishappy 1y agoEntirely, as is sensing.
- xnx 1y agoBright futures for these engineers in the defense industry.
- cluckindan 1y agoThe same cannot be said about whoever runs the site.
- GuinansEyebrows 1y agobright futures in the darkest places.
- jryle70 1y agoTell that to the Ukrainians who fight the brutal war Russia are waging: https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-commanders-exclusive-insights-on-brutal-drone-warfare-on-the-frontline https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-commanders-exclu...
- jandrese 1y agoThis is only a few days after the massive drone attack in Russia. Only a matter of time until we have drones smart enough to dodge bullets (or at least dodge out of where guns are pointing) while flying at breakneck speeds being controlled by AIs we don't fully understand. The tech industry is working hard to bring about the Terminator future.
- stackedinserter 1y agoOTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.
- Swoerd 1y ago-That you know of.
- ceejayoz 1y agoAs long as the end of civilization comes soon, we'll be fine!
- insane_dreamer 1y agoThe seeds of the Butlerian Jihad
- jandrese 1y agoThere is already mass adoption of drones, the AI stuff is only lagging behind slightly.
- stackedinserter 1y agoPlease read before responding.
- karn97 1y ago[dead]
- dghlsakjg 1y agoAre you sure? One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems. Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just constantly jammed in this part of the world. If you can get a GPS signal on the battlefield, you can tell a drone to go destroy something.
- atonse 1y agoOh man, can anyone imagine a non-Terminator scenario for this? Update: I'm not saying people shouldn't develop this, we're never going to squash human curiosity. But when I see this kind of stuff, I'm deeply troubled by how bad actors (state and non-state) will use this. I hope our security services are working hard on countering these potential threats.
- TYPE_FASTER 1y agoInspecting utilities and other industrial infrastructure.
- jmccarthy 1y agovery prompt burrito delivery?
- generalizations 1y agoIn china probably very soon. In the US? Regulation has already killed that.
- cluckindan 1y agoIf by burrito you mean shaped charge high explosives with lethal shrapnel, triggered by facial recognition, delivered by drones the size of house sparrows at the speed of sound, then yes, burrito delivery.
- roughly 1y agoChrist, you sound like my nutritionist.
- cluckindan 1y agoGo, Forth and multiply matrices.
- lbotos 1y agoI feel like search and rescue after an earthquake where a drone swarm can canvas and categorize if it saw movement or not is one possible "non-bad" use.
- siavosh 1y agoI man at this point, given what we know I'm sure someone smart can connect some dots and describe what's inevitable with 99% confidence just in the next year or two in terms of society right?
- CamperBob2 1y agoThe only question is whether motors or propellers will be banned for private sale first. (After drones themselves, of course.)
- dylan604 1y agoWhy? Just request a Waymo, and then put your suitcase nuke in the backseat and watch it be delivered by AI. There's all sorts of ways to kill with AI without needing drones
- yunwal 1y agoWaymo is not anonymous
- dylan604 1y agogoodgooglymoogly, some people just are not creative thinkers at all. you think someone with the ability of creating a suitcase nuke isn't going to have the means to have a fake identity specifically for this purpose? or just steal someone else's? or being willing to make that sacrifice so being anonymous isn't a requirement?
- yunwal 1y agoDrones seem a lot easier and more flexible than all that. And you could operate them at scale. I’m not particularly concerned about weapons in the hands of an isolated criminal. That already exists everywhere. I’m concerned about sophisticated organizations
- pjc50 1y ago
- ilikeatari 1y agoLooks like it had NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16 GB. No GPS, Lidar, motion capture so its vision only. 6s battery so 5 incher?
- ilikeatari 1y agoDoes anyone know the FC or AIO they are flying?
- airstrike 1y agoInterestingly, the URL for the embedded youtube video ends with the word "FATE"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE
- rossant 1y agoGives me the idea for a silly game: finding YouTube videos with words in their identifiers that are relevant to the content.
- rvz 1y agoMeanwhile, many defense companies are quietly watching this racing achievement far far away through their palantíri orb researching who built that autonomous drone.
- bri3d 1y agoThis is quite cool since past efforts in this direction have usually relied on crutches like outside-in imaging and positioning. A few details I picked up: * The drones are a spec drone across the league. It's a fairly large-footprint FPV racing drone (it's a 5" propped drone, but it's very stretched out and quite heavy) with both a Betaflight flight controller and a Jetson Orin NX onboard. Teams were only allowed an IMU and a single forward camera. * It's unclear to me whether the teams were allowed to bypass the typical Betaflight flight controller which is present on the drone and use direct IMU input and ESC commands from the Jetson, or whether they were sending and receiving commands from the flight controller and relying on its onboard rate stabilization PID loop. DCL is kind of a weird drone racing league since it's made for TV; it's mostly simulator based with, more recently, only few real events a year. The spec DCL drone isn't very capable compared to the more open-specification drones in racing leagues like MultiGP, in large part to keep the events more spectator friendly. This probably makes it more amenable to AI, which is an interesting side effect.
- generalizations 1y agoFrom near the bottom: > One of the core new elements of the drone’s AI is the use of a deep neural network that doesn’t send control commands to a traditional human controller, but directly to the motors.
- bri3d 1y agoI saw that too - I'm assuming it means they're indeed using the DNN for stabilization. This has been done several times over the years, but generally with results which only rival PID and don't surpass it, so that's quite interesting. What's odd is that the physical architecture of the drone doesn't really make sense for this, so there must be some tweaks beyond the "spec" model. Hopefully some papers come soon instead of press releases.
- koolala 1y agoThis is crazy, its dexterity and range of motion could potentially exceed all human modeled systems.
- zellyn 1y agoLooks like most of the comments here are about the use as weapons and the possible dangers. I believe "Slaughterbots" is the canonical sci-fi video on the subject, and it appears to be aging pretty well. Unfortunately… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
- 77pt77 1y agohttps://archive.is/wip/H3AAn https://archive.is/wip/H3AAn Since I can't access.
- sveinatle 1y agoI remember being blown away by a TED talk were "minimum snap trajectories" are planned for quadcopters to fly through hoops and slots. It's really cool to see this happening fully autonomously and at such high speed. I wonder if the use of AI means that the approach is fundamentally different, or if it uses the same principle of minimizing snap? https://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_cooperate https://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_co...
- pacetest 1y agoIt's fundamentally different, it's using an RL trained network that gets the drone state (position, orientation, velocity) as input and directly outputs motor commands.
- genewitch 1y agoDo you happen to know the bandwidth of the telemetry fed to the network? How many bytes/s.
- pacetest 1y agoNot much since it doesn't take images as it's input and it's running on an embedded mcu. Based on the papers linked elsewhere in here the state vector is 24 floats and it's running at 1kHz so around 100 kB/s.
- leeoniya 1y agoELI5? so, presumably if you put this thing in front of any starting gate it can navigate any course of similar gates? or was it overfitted to this specific course?
- itishappy 1y agoThey had no prior knowledge of the course.
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y agoI don't think so. The article says the race track was controlled by the race organisers but not that it wasn't known to the participants before the race. Anyway given the state of the art, flying autonomously at great speeds and beating human champions without pre-training, i.e. on an unknown race track, would be a much bigger breakthrough than just beating some human champions (which has already happened except in a less official environment). You can rest assured that if that was what the team achieved, the article would be telling us all about it.
- itishappy 1y agoShoot, you're totally right. They had no prior knowledge before the event, but I don't know how they teach it the course. There's more than one gate visible at a time, so they must do something to fine-tune it. That being said, I'm sure they have a base model too, so I'm right back to wondering about the parent question: would it work if you set it down in front of a few fresh gates?
- YeGoblynQueenne 1y agoProbably not. RL is really bad at generalising to unseen environments. There was a paper about an ... otter? Why Generalization in RL is Difficult: Epistemic POMDPs and Implicit Partial Observability https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06277 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06277 OK, it's a robotic zookeeper looking for the otter cage. Where does it say they had no prior knowledge before the event? I can't find that in the text. Is it in the video? I guess there's no paper yet.
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago...why are we training skynet again?
- bamboozled 1y agobecause there is money in it ?
- snewman 1y agoA few questions / thoughts: 1. I didn't see it stated explicitly, but I presume the neural net is on the far end of a radio link somewhere, not running on hardware physically mounted on the drone? 2. After viewing the FPV video on the linked page: how the hell do human pilots even come close to this pace? Insane (even assuming that the video they're seeing is higher quality than what's shown on YouTube – is it?) 3. The control software has access to an IMU. This seems to represent some degree of unfair advantage? I presume the human pilots don't have that – unless the IMU data is somehow overlaid onto their FPV view (but even then, I can't imagine how much practice would be needed to learn to make use of that in realtime).
- itishappy 1y ago1. It's entirely onboard. 2. The video they're seeing is worse. Spectators typically see the frames saved directly from the camera, but the pilot will be seeing them compressed and beamed over the air to their headset. See vid. 3. The human pilots do actually have access to it. Not directly, but the flight controller translates their inputs and makes use of the IMU to do so. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE
- roughly 1y ago> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMGRLGkm0QE I’m reminded of when the US military figured out it should just replace all its proprietary field drone controllers with Xbox controllers because every single grunt that enlisted already had 10,000 hours on the things. If the future of warfare is drones, Christ, that video is terrifying.
- itishappy 1y agoFunny you should say that. Gamepads are not quite what you want for drone piloting for three main reasons: 1. Less precise. Gimble size matters. 2. All inputs sprung. This is exactly what you want for your three rotational axis, but you absolutely do not want your throttle resetting to 50% when you lay off. You can fix this using 3D mode where the zero setting is in the middle, but then you lose even more precision. 3. Circular inputs. This means at low or high throttle you have less roll available. The main reason you'd want a gamepad is the size and shape. They do make gamepad-style radios, like the Radiomaster Pocket, which combine the best of both worlds. You can pick up a simulator for $10-20 if anyone wants to give it a whirl, and many are even on Steam, but the general recommendation is to pick up a dedicated radio as soon as possible. Note that this mainly applies to FPV quadcopters, due to how sensitive and twitchy they can be. When it comes to controlling pretty much anything else (I'd argue even most planes) these advantages are no longer relevant.
- Quitschquat 1y agoThe drone has a camera and a IMU while the human has only the camera. How big is the advantage there?
- itishappy 1y agoHumans have a flight controller in the loop, which makes use of the IMU. I doubt we'd be able to make much use of it.
- koolala 1y agoThis feels like a bigger deal than what Carmack is doing with an Atari controller robot.
- emsign 1y agoSo the drones in the Slaughterbots short film were depicted to be way too slow.
- rangestransform 1y agoHave the team published based on this work yet?
- pacetest 1y agoNo, but there's a previous paper for the controller used: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21586 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21586
- polishdude20 1y ago> Flying drones faster will be important for many economic and societal applications, ranging from delivering blood samples and defibrillators in time to finding people in natural disaster scenarios Ah yes. No mention of the real big use case
- Leo-thorne 1y agoI’ve seen AI beat humans in simulations before, but doing it on a real track with the same hardware is honestly kind of amazing. What surprised me the most is they didn’t use any traditional flight controller. They just let the neural network handle the flying. I’m really curious how this would perform in messier, less controlled environments.
- shinycode 1y agoA side note, will we still attend and watch Formula 1 races it AI would drive cars (maybe near perfection) ?
- tialaramex 1y agoHuman sports remain interesting when the humans are notably worse at whatever they do than a machine purpose built for it, or indeed wildlife that specialised for this. Usain Bolt was the fastest human sprinter in the world, but compared to a good motorcycle over paved road he's obviously not very fast, and likewise compared to an emu. Nevertheless, Bolt's 100m performance drew big crowds, even though people also watch Motorcycle racing and (I think?) Emu racing. It's like speed running, the categories are arbitrary and self-selecting. Why the Modern Pentathlon? Why not. Why Super Mario Warpless? Why not. If everybody wanted to do Super Mario, only the odd numbered levels and also you must kill all the enemies, that's what the run is, our choices are arbitrary and we value whatever we like.
- frakt0x90 1y agoYes. People thought computers would kill chess, but despite current chess engines being able to trounce every human in existence, chess is more popular than ever.
- zemvpferreira 1y agoThat said “regular” chess is deeply in crisis, with less computer-assisted formats coming up to challenge it.
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- Alex_001 1y ago[dead]
- Aziell 1y agoThis technological breakthrough is truly amazing, especially the fact that the drone can fly on an actual race track independently, without relying on human control. It's really cool. But honestly, as AI gets better at doing what we can do, even better in some cases, it makes me a little uneasy. Will there come a day when we truly become redundant, with AI taking over the work?
- Jimmc414 1y agoQuite cool but this is the beginning of the end I’m afraid
- DoingIsLearning 1y agoThe actual race is also worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz2in2eFATE The speed and flawlessness is quite impressive considering it is being resolved with what I imagine is noisy inertial data and a motion blurred CCD camera.
- tonii141 1y agoLet's not forget that this works solely for this particular racing setup. If you change a single gate, the AI they are using would not be able to adapt. Still fascinating, though.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bicepjai 1y agoFamous last words :)
- tonii141 1y agoI have been involved in research focused on ML control for some time, and believe me, I would love to see an AI model capable of controlling arbitrary systems at different operating points or in different environments. However, it is simply not feasible yet. This AI drone is no different, especially because reinforcement learning was used to train the model, which is generally not practical for real-world systems due to disturbance variables and the continuous need for adaptability.
- _ache_ 1y agoNearly two years from comparable to human to beat the best. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/30/1196777528/an-ai-quadcopter-has-beaten-human-champions-at-drone-racing https://www.npr.org/2023/08/30/1196777528/an-ai-quadcopter-h...
- miki123211 1y agoThis makes me wonder what the "best" vehicle for human racing would be like, if there was no requirement for a human driver. Let's say your task is to move a human from A to B (by a pre-designated route) as fast as possible. The only conditions are vehicle weight, no outside radio contact and no damaging the road (assume each vehicle goes separately, so e.g. slip stream effects don't matter). You can rely on the human to drive or use AI, you can go on the ground or fly through the air, anything is allowed. What would be the best way to do this?
- polonbike 1y agoWell .. it depends on other assumptions, like the amount and type of energy allowed (continuous gigawatt electricity access during the trip ?), amount of "roughness" the human can sustain during the trip (canonball a human packed in an big airbag ?), actual budget limit for the project, etc ....
- npilk 1y agoNot exactly what you're after, but similar: https://what-if.xkcd.com/116/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/116/
- 83 1y ago>> The only conditions are vehicle weight, no outside radio contact and no damaging the road Desiccate the human and compact him into an aerodynamic shape. Carry the (now much lighter and more aerodynamic) human inside a small rocket.
- _joel 1y ago"Coming to a battlefield near you soon."
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- northisup 1y agoI highly recommend Macross Plus for further research this topic: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2330912/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2330912/
- wslh 1y agoEven R2D2 doesn't pilot the X-wing itself.
- palmotea 1y ago> This is more than just a racing win. The smart lightweight AI that powered the drone could help all kinds of future robots, making them faster, more efficient, and better at... ...killing you, their target.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoIt looks like the reason it won is due to a human pilot crashing into the obstacle. Not exactly an unfair problem, but worth mentioning that it was close until human mistakes were made.
- ByteDrifter 1y ago[dead]
- ivanjermakov 1y agoSimilar tech from 2023: https://youtu.be/HGULBBAo5lA?si=D5uCJYAPD9iHA-p7 https://youtu.be/HGULBBAo5lA?si=D5uCJYAPD9iHA-p7
- narrator 1y agoThe sci-fi novel I wrote sacrifices commercial art considerations to portray the future of war more realistically. All the robots are one-shot, one-kill and all action takes place faster than human reaction time. The most humans do is approve battle plans. This is already the case largely in the Ukraine/Russia war, and now we're seeing that human FPV operators will soon be obsolete. Realistic sci-fi movies are going to be not have much action in the future. Things will have to be about careful political maneuvering, like in totalitarian country politics. You can't win against robots unless you are using other robots.
- vbezhenar 1y agoFPVs are the most distinctive element in Russian-Ukrainian war, changing many traditional war dogmas. So far AI in this war wasn't heavily used, FPVs are controlled by humans at both sides. I feel uneasy with more AI tech improving FPVs. It's inevitable, but it'll be utilised by military operations to kill more people, to conduct terror acts, controlled from afar. It allows weak players to have more leverage which is not always a good thing, and certainly disrupts power balance. Think about Al-Qaeda bringing a truck of explosive drones to Washington DC and unleashing them at White House, all autonomous, with cameras guiding the way.
- beeflet 1y agoI don't know, this drone race is to combat drones what F1 racing is to self driving cars. In order to win in these races, you just need to precisely control speed around well-defined turns and stuff. You don't need to adapt to a new environment. It's not surprising to me that a computer program would win in such a controlled environment. > It allows weak players to have more leverage I think it depends on the dominant type of defensive counter-technology used. If it's something with high capital costs like a laser or a microwave, then it will centralize combat because the USA could invest in the infrastructure needed to defeat terrorists, but not the reverse. On the other hand, if you can effectively destroy these things with birdshot, then it may not be a problem for humanity at large. I could imagine you could make some device that tracks the drones and shoots them down for much less than the price of a drone. For example look at the iron dome: it is effective defense measure but very difficult to scale up to counter ICBMs.
- FridayoLeary 1y agoWhat point are you trying to make. Because the iron dome is hideously expensive. It costs so much more then the missiles it intercepts that it's worth it for terrorists to fire on israel purely to waste their money. The iranian icbms from Yemen gets shot down by other systems. I don't think they are scaled up versions of the iron dome. What's interesting is the lack of confidence israel has in predicting their trajectory. They usually send up multiple interceptors for a single missile and put sirens on for half the country. The only really economical counter i've heard of is lasers but it doesn't look like they are coming any time soon. I've got no idea what method Israel uses to counter drones, but they certainly have struggled with them. My absolute nightmare scenario is Iran via its proxies unleashing swarms of autonomous kamikaze drones in population centres.