ACM TechNews

Stanford's 'Autonomous' Helicopters Teach Themselves to Fly

Stanford University (08/29/08) Stober, Dan

Stanford University computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves how to fly and perform difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers. Professor Andrew Ng says the stunts are by far the most complex aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer-controlled helicopter. The helicopters learned how to perform the stunts by watching a helicopter controlled by expert radio control pilot Garett Oku. After observing the human-controlled helicopter, the AI-controlled helicopter performed a variety of stunts on its own. The air show is an important demonstration in "apprenticeship learning," in which robots learn by observing an expert instead of having software engineers attempt to write the instructions from scratch. "I think the range of maneuvers they can do is by far the largest," says Georgia Institute of Technology professor Eric Feron. "But what's more impressive is the technology that underlies this work." To teach the helicopter to fly, the researchers had Oku and other pilots fly entire air show routines while recording the movements of the helicopter. As maneuvers were repeated several times, the trajectory of the helicopter varied slightly with each flight, but the learning algorithms were able to discern the ideal trajectory the pilot was seeking, enabling the autonomous helicopter to learn to fly the same routine better and more consistently than the human pilots. During autonomous flight, a ground-based computer processes the data, makes quick calculations, and sends new instructions back to the helicopter 20 times per second.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/september10/helicopter-091008.html

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