{"id":2007122,"date":"2019-03-13T15:22:35","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T19:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=2007122"},"modified":"2019-03-13T15:24:14","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T19:24:14","slug":"drones-artificial-intelligence-controller-2007122","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/drones-artificial-intelligence-controller-2007122\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Neuroflight’ drone controller gets a boost from A.I."},"content":{"rendered":"
Machine learning powers a new kind of drone flight controller software, researchers report.<\/p>\n
After Wil Koch flew a friend’s drone for the first time, operating it through “first-person view” where a person wears a headset connected to a video feed streaming live from a camera on the drone, he thought it was amazing. So amazing that he went out that same day and purchased his own system\u2014a video headset, controller, and quadcopter drone, named for the four propellers that power it.<\/p>\n
“You put the goggles on and they allow you to see live video transmitting from a camera mount on the drone,” Koch says. It is “by far, the coolest thing.”<\/p>\n
First-person-view drone racing is gaining popularity among technology enthusiasts, and there are competitive races around the world. Just a few weeks after his introduction to the sport, Koch, a graduate researcher at the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational 糖心视频 at Boston University, founded Boston Drone Racing as a new computing club.<\/p>\nFirst-person-view droning is a technique where a person wears a headset connected to a video feed streaming live from a camera on the drone. Here, Wil Koch uses the technique to operate a drone outfitted with a Neuroflight controller, which uses a trained neural network to maneuver through dynamic environmental conditions like wind. (Credit: Wil Koch\/Boston U.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
But because Koch thinks like a computer scientist, his mind soon turned to looking for ways that he could take “the coolest thing” and make it even cooler. What if, he wondered, you could leverage artificial intelligence to fly a drone faster and more precisely than the standard set-up?<\/p>\n
Ditching ‘zombies’ for drones<\/h3>\n
Koch probably would never have pursued the idea if not for that day when he flew his friend’s drone from a bird’s-eye view. But it was his newfound passion that would inspire a breakthrough in neural network technology, when he and a team of collaborators built Neuroflight to optimize flight performance.<\/p>\n
“[His] prior love was related to cybersecurity and defending against autonomous cyberattacks from ‘zombie’ computers,” says Koch’s faculty advisor Azer Bestavros, founding director of the Hariri Institute and senior author of the team’s first public paper<\/a> describing Neuroflight.<\/p>\n