Photos At the Controls
While the cameras rolled and instruments recorded, Garett Oku, an expert radio-controlled helicopter pilot, sent one helicopter into a series of flips, rolls, twists and other complex maneuvers, even a "tic toc" -- a difficult aerial trick where the helicopter's nose points straight up and it swings side to side like a pendulum. Oku flew the same 10-minute routine several times. Ten minutes after the final demonstration flight, the computer had turned Oku's 20 years of training and experience into data that another helicopter then used to create flawless flights, one after another. "For an expert helicopter pilot to fly the same exact path over and over is very impressive," said Coates. "Some of them spend years trying to do it." Eric Feron, now a professor at Georgia Tech, worked on autonomous helicopters several years ago when he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He says the Stanford team has pushed the limits of autonomous helicopter flight and computer programming. "What I'm most impressed with is the learning part, the ability of the algorithm to learn and to fly and then to reproduce that in another aircraft," said Feron. "No one had done that before." Learning still requires a teacher, however. The computer algorithm can only copy the moves of a human pilot. It can't think independently or creatively, although that is certainly a possibility for the future, said both Coates and Abbeel. Related Links: Stanford University: Autonomous Helicopter |
advertisement
Put Discovery News on Your Site!
|
-
our sites
-
video
mobile
-
shop
-
stay connected
-
corporate
