Tuesday, July 15, 2025
LBNN
  • Business
  • Markets
  • Politics
  • Crypto
  • Finance
  • Energy
  • Technology
  • Taxes
  • Creator Economy
  • Wealth Management
  • Documentaries
No Result
View All Result
LBNN

Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds

Simon Osuji by Simon Osuji
February 8, 2024
in Artificial Intelligence
0
Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds
0
SHARES
0
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter



It’s kind of astonishing how quadrotors have scaled over the last decade. Like, we’re now at the point where they’re verging on disposable, at least from a commercial or research perspective—for a bit over US $200, you can buy a little 27-gram, completely open source drone, and all you have to do is teach it to fly. That’s where things do get a bit more challenging, though, because teaching drones to fly is not a straightforward process. Thanks to good simulation and techniques like reinforcement learning, it’s much easier to imbue drones with autonomy than it used to be. But it’s not typically a fast process, and it can be finicky to make a smooth transition from simulation to reality.

New York University’s Agile Robotics and Perception Lab has managed to streamline the process of getting basic autonomy to work on drones, and streamline it by a lot: The lab’s system is able to train a drone in simulation from nothing up to stable and controllable flying in 18 seconds flat on a MacBook Pro. And it actually takes longer to compile and flash the firmware onto the drone itself than it does for the entire training process.

Related posts

Tech Billionaires Back Erebor in the Wake of Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

Tech Billionaires Back Erebor in the Wake of Silicon Valley Bank Collapse

July 15, 2025
Toward Trustworthy AI: A Zero-Trust Framework for Foundational Models

Toward Trustworthy AI: A Zero-Trust Framework for Foundational Models

July 15, 2025

ARPL NYU

So not only is the drone able to keep a stable hover while rejecting pokes and nudges and wind, but it’s also able to fly specific trajectories. Not bad for 18 seconds, right?

One of the things that typically slows down training times is the need to keep refining exactly what you’re training for, without refining it so much that you’re only training your system to fly in your specific simulation rather than the real world. The strategy used here is what the researchers call a ‘curriculum’ (you can also think of it as a sort of lesson plan) to adjust the reward function used to train the system through reinforcement learning. The curriculum starts things off being more forgiving and gradually increasing the penalties to emphasize robustness and reliability. This is all about efficiency: Doing that training that you need to do in the way that it needs to be done to get the results you want, and no more.

There are other, more straightforward tricks that optimize this technique for speed as well. The deep reinforcement learning algorithms are particularly efficient, and leverage the hardware acceleration that comes along with Apple’s M-series processors. The simulator efficiency multiplies the benefits of the curriculum-driven sample efficiency of the reinforcement learning pipeline, leading to that wicked fast training time.

This approach isn’t limited to simple tiny drones—it’ll work on pretty much any drone, including bigger and more expensive ones, or even a drone that you yourself build from scratch.

Jonas Eschmann

We’re told that it took minutes rather than seconds to train a policy for the drone in the video above, although the researchers expect that 18 seconds is achievable even for a more complex drone like this in the near future. And it’s all open source, so you can, in fact, build a drone and teach it to fly with this system. But if you wait a little bit, it’s only going to get better: The researchers tell us that they’re working on integrating with the PX4 open source drone autopilot. Longer term, the idea is to have a single policy that can adapt to different environmental conditions, as well as different vehicle configurations, meaning that this could work on all kinds of flying robots rather than just quadrotors.

Everything you need to run this yourself is available on GitHub, and the paper is on ArXiv here.

From Your Site Articles

Related Articles Around the Web



Source link

Previous Post

Google saves your conversations with Gemini for years by default

Next Post

Rand slips ahead of president’s speech

Next Post
Rand slips ahead of president’s speech

Rand slips ahead of president’s speech

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

RECOMMENDED NEWS

CRDB issues Tanzania’s first green bond

CRDB issues Tanzania’s first green bond

2 years ago
SA’s monetary base surges 26% with new surplus system

SA’s monetary base surges 26% with new surplus system

2 years ago
Bilfinger discuss inspection in the future of nuclear energy

Bilfinger discuss inspection in the future of nuclear energy

7 months ago
United States to Use Bitcoin to Save the Dollar?

United States to Use Bitcoin to Save the Dollar?

12 months ago

POPULAR NEWS

  • Ghana to build three oil refineries, five petrochemical plants in energy sector overhaul

    Ghana to build three oil refineries, five petrochemical plants in energy sector overhaul

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • When Will SHIB Reach $1? Here’s What ChatGPT Says

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • The world’s top 10 most valuable car brands in 2025

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Top 10 African countries with the highest GDP per capita in 2025

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Global ranking of Top 5 smartphone brands in Q3, 2024

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact

© 2023 LBNN - All rights reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Business
  • Politics
  • Markets
  • Crypto
  • Economics
    • Manufacturing
    • Real Estate
    • Infrastructure
  • Finance
  • Energy
  • Creator Economy
  • Wealth Management
  • Taxes
  • Telecoms
  • Military & Defense
  • Careers
  • Technology
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Investigative journalism
  • Art & Culture
  • Documentaries
  • Quizzes
    • Enneagram quiz
  • Newsletters
    • LBNN Newsletter
    • Divergent Capitalist

© 2023 LBNN - All rights reserved.