Why it matters to you Drones need to be able to autonomously fly better to cope with the complexities of the real world.
You know the saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again?”
Well, it also counts for drones.
At least, that is the takeaway message from a recent paper titled “Learning to Fly by Crashing,” published by roboticists from Carnegie Mellon University.
They subjected hapless drones to 11,500 collisions in 20 different indoor environments, spread over 40 hours of flying time, to prove it.
We can use human experts and ask them to fly drones, but such data is small in size and biased towards success since the number of crashes is very low.”.
In their study, the drones were instructed to fly slowly until colliding with something, after which they would return to the starting position and set off in a new direction. »