Stanford’s “autonomous” helicopters teach themselves to fly
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.
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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.
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It might seem that an autonomous helicopter could fly stunts by simply replaying the exact finger movements of an expert pilot using the joy sticks on the helicopter’s remote controller. That approach, however, is doomed to failure because of uncontrollable variables such as gusting winds.
Very cool. Related: MIT’s Autonomous Cooperating Flying Vehicles - The sub-$1,000 UAV Project - 6 Inch Bat Plane - Kayak Robots
August 31st, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Simply amazing! With this type of learning, robots could do virtually anything, just by watching it be done. That’s incredible!
September 2nd, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Occasionally I look here by and read the interesting and well written contributions. Today I would like to leave gladly a greeting from Thuringia in Germany!
September 4th, 2008 at 7:42 am
It was predictable! Smart people do everything that robots look and do like them exactly. But they don’t even guess what that all brings to them
But anyway it is a one more step forward in the engineering.