Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff • Hacker News Board

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#11

Post by stefs » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

> But SARA doesn’t rely as much on “high-order” functions like AI since those are harder to certify. (“To be FAA certifiable, you need a certain level of determinism in the outcomes,” Van Buiten says.)

i've just recently finished peter watts "freeze frame revolution" of the sunflower cycle, where the gate-building spaceship eriophora is mostly on its own for thousands of years while the crew sleeps, guided by an AI called "the chimp".

-- spoilers --

one of the key ideas in this book is that the ships AI - the chimp - is not advanced at all, with a synapse count of roughly the chimp. anything more intelligent would get unstable and develop its own motives, so the original builders constructed it to be comparatively dumb and thus stable, predictable and deterministic (the humans are woken up only in case something unexpected happens which requires more creativity and brainpower).

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#12

Post by hirundo » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 4:16 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

>> Flying a helicopter requires such an intense mental load, he says, that even small things like pushing the “talk” button can put a novice pilot in peril. No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast. But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern machines, even ancient ones, have t…

> Feed them data from a radar altimeter and they can hover like a rock.

That's not good, right?

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#13

Post by sandworm101 » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #12

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

>> Flying a helicopter requires such an intense mental load, he says, that even small things like pushing the “talk” button can put a novice pilot in peril. No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast. But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern machines, even ancient ones, have t…

> Feed them data from a radar altimeter and they can hover like a rock. That's not good, right?

Well, "rock" as in solid-as-as. Watch any of the new rescue helos hovering over a ship.

There are legends in AF helo communities about entire crews falling asleep during long hovers. (The anti-submarine helicopters have to hover in place while dipping their sonar into the water.)

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#14

Post by tome » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

>> Flying a helicopter requires such an intense mental load, he says, that even small things like pushing the “talk” button can put a novice pilot in peril. No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast. But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern machines, even ancient ones, have t…

This is really interesting and surprising to me. Can any helicopter pilot explain why hovering is not as easy as just taking your hands off the controls? That's how I always imagined a helicopter would work!

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#15

Post by aidenn0 » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

hirundo wrote: post #12

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

>> Flying a helicopter requires such an intense mental load, he says, that even small things like pushing the “talk” button can put a novice pilot in peril. No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast. But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern machines, even ancient ones, have t…

> Feed them data from a radar altimeter and they can hover like a rock. That's not good, right?

Yeah, that immediately made me think of Hitchikers:

> The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#16

Post by yingw787 » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 5:05 PM UTC

I think Sikorsky's probably ahead in the race for realistic autonomous flight. Sikorsky isn't a trendy/hot company by any means, but they're reliable, they deliver, and they have the contact infrastructure with FAA and NTSB and other government certification orgs that would handle this new development. I don't know if they'd offer "air-taxis", but decreasing the cost of helicopter travel so that a seed/Series A startup CEO can travel vs. the Fortune 500 CEOs would be a major improvement in and of itself.

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#17

Post by yutyut » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

>> Flying a helicopter requires such an intense mental load, he says, that even small things like pushing the “talk” button can put a novice pilot in peril. No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast. But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern machines, even ancient ones, have t…

I'm pretty sure everything in your last paragraph could be done with enough good input (sensors, approach mins, DTED, Digital Wx updates, etc) and the correct application of 1's and 0's. Not really that hard of a problem to solve unless you're operating somewhere very data-austere.

To your first point-and I think you hit it but I wanted to emphasize-some helicopters are hard to fly, some mission sets are more difficult than others; hovering with a 30 knot tailwind in a $32 million dollar aircraft with SCAS and AFCS is still a pain in the ass especially when it's low light and you're on goggles...but I guess the AI wouldn't need to be aided, so call that a win.

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#18

Post by starpilot » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 5:11 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #14

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

>> Flying a helicopter requires such an intense mental load, he says, that even small things like pushing the “talk” button can put a novice pilot in peril. No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast. But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern machines, even ancient ones, have t…

This is really interesting and surprising to me. Can any helicopter pilot explain why hovering is not as easy as just taking your hands off the controls? That's how I always imagined a helicopter would work!

It's like standing on a basketball, any perturbation in the wrong direction causes it to accelerate in that direction. The whole thing is vibrating in multiple planes, so it requires constant control inputs to keep it from veering off.

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#19

Post by yutyut » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 5:13 PM UTC

tome wrote: post #14

sandworm101 wrote: post #10

>> Flying a helicopter requires such an intense mental load, he says, that even small things like pushing the “talk” button can put a novice pilot in peril. No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast. But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern machines, even ancient ones, have t…

This is really interesting and surprising to me. Can any helicopter pilot explain why hovering is not as easy as just taking your hands off the controls? That's how I always imagined a helicopter would work!

Ideally you can trim a modern helicopter out much like you would an airplane however it's still a dynamically (?) unstable platform. I'm far removed from aero and nobody really thinks about the details of that stuff when they're flying. Here's a good summary:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/35764/are-helic...

Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

#20

Post by dsfyu404ed » Wed, Mar 06, 2019, 5:20 PM UTC

readhn wrote: post #8

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably would have died in the gulag or at the very least not achieved what he did. Stalin was not fond of the aerospace industry so the guy who's at the leading edge of designing rotary winged aircraft would likely find his name high up on the wrong list and if he escaped that fate the money wouldn't have exactly been flowing his way.

Its definitely a strong possibility that his talent would have gone unrealized! Imagine it didn't. Literally the outcome of WWII could have been very different. Of course "what if's" dont count. Still fascinating to me how much he's accomplished 100 years ago! Here we are today burning 100's of millions in cash of investors money with "0 results" (really). lol

>Its definitely a strong possibility that his talent would have gone unrealized!

Mikhail Kalashnikov wanted to design agricultural equipment because he wanted to help prevent famine. Who knows if he would have been any good at it but that door closed on June 22 1941.

It's hard to say what would have happened had history been different.