Also Leonardo (Agusta-Westland) -https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/20...
Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#22Sikorsky's story is really fascinating to me. 4 years after immigrating from Russia he founded an aviation company in USA. And in 15 years he was already building airplanes and then first ever helicopter! ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Igor_Sik... ) If he stayed in Russia the course of human history might have been very different ... if he was developing all that technology for the USSR... and…
> If he stayed in Russia the course of human history might have been very different... if he was developing all that technology for the USSR... and not USA. I have serious doubts about this. His talents might be lost for humanity completely. Post-revolution and before WW2 there were a lot of constructors and engineers who were prosecuted, displaced or even worse by the Soviets. The wikipedia says "After the Bolshevik…
Similar also to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China, many scientists and other intellectuals never came back from those camps[1]. Presumably modern China would look quite different if that hadn't been the case.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#23I 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 start…
Reminds me of a gag in Bojack Horseman. The scene is a metropole traffic jam, with the cars standing still in a neat column, and in the background you can see an analogous column of helicopters, hovering still in the sky. It's a helicopter jam.
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#24I 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 start…
I don't think the pilot factors in that much into the cost of operating a helicopter. Even a small helicopter (e.g. Robinson R-44 which is a bare bones trainer) needs a ~250k complete overhaul every 2200 hours/12 years in service. Add $60 dollars per hour in fuel and 60-100 per hour of miscellaneous other maintenance, and your variable costs quickly approach 300/hr. Add in all the fixed overhead, and a tiny helicopter that can take 2 passengers and limited baggage will run $400 dollars per hour easily (which is about what they rent for). A bigger turbine helicopter is significantly more expensive.
Most of this is because helicopters are complex machines (you're spinning really big blades pretty fast. Then using the blades + bearing to also lift the weight of the helicopter + more. Oh and you're changing the pitch angle of the blades. Oh you mean changing the pitch angles of the blades WHILE THEY GO AROUND...) and any failure in any of these parts is usually fatal so they have to be built and maintained to a very high degree of reliability.
Airplanes are much simpler (the spinning propeller attached to an engine is one part. The wing generating lift is another part. the flight controls are yet another part) and have more opportunities for redundancy ( a wing has multiple spars, and is attached to the airplane with many bolts. All helicopter blades meet in one hub, which is attached on one axis).
Combine that with aircraft scaling up more (you can build 500 person aircraft, but only 20 person or so helicopters), going much faster (a 120 dollar/hr propeller plane will outrun many/most helicopters) and the cost to go a given distance by plane will always be much cheaper than a helicopter.
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#25Sikorsky's story is really fascinating to me. 4 years after immigrating from Russia he founded an aviation company in USA. And in 15 years he was already building airplanes and then first ever helicopter! ( https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Igor_Sik... ) If he stayed in Russia the course of human history might have been very different ... if he was developing all that technology for the USSR... and…
The downfall of the Russian Empire was really good for American aviation. Other examples are Seversky who founded Republic aviation and Kartveli who designed many of the important aircraft for Seversky were both Russian noblemen who would have been killed by the Bolsheviks.
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#26> 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 wonder whether a hybrid approach is the future, since in some tasks neural networks are just far better than anything we have. If the only tasks of the neural network is to estimate/classify some sensor-input and is trained in a purely supervised setting, the "right thing" for the neural network is still pretty well defined and rigorous testing should be possible (simple tasks can be very complex to implement). Then, interpretable, high-level reasoning could be solved by old-school coding (and maybe verifying).
This is not possible with end-to-end training.
But I am not sure what they mean, normally neural network (and their training) is purely deterministic. It's not that they are just very good at rolling a dice.
I am not into this stuff (autonomous, "intelligent" systems, more the data-analysis guy), but I would use neural networks for simple to define, hard problems that involve a lot of noisy data (where some kind of accuracy on some test-set is a well-defined metric) and then build a higher-level reasing system by hand.
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#27>> 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!
A hover isn't as dynamic as forward flight. A fixed-wing aircraft like a glider can self-regulate using aerodynamic forces. For instance: If the nose tips up, the plane slows. The wings generate less lift and the nose tips back down. Plane then speeds up ... etc. But a hovering helicopter doesn't experience any significant airflow changes. If it's nose tips up it just keeps tipping up. The helo then starts sliding backwards until the tail catches the wind, spinning everything 180 like a weather vain and very quickly you aren't flying any more. The pilot/computer/gyro needs to keep ahead of these forces.
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#28>> 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…
> No they are not that hard to fly.
I suspect you have not tried hovering in a helicopter.
> autopilots really do work
There are actually very few autopilots that can hover. Not just because it's technically hard (the soviet Kamov helicopters could maintain hover back in 1980's), but also because of the certification requirements.
If a DJI drone hits a tree it's not a big deal. The story is very different when a helicopter does it.
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#29> 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 wonder whether a hybrid approach is the future, since in some tasks neural networks are just far better than anything we have. If the only tasks of the neural network is to estimate/classify some sensor-input and is…
I think they are using the wrong word here, I think by "determinism" they mean interpretable. You train your big neural network to classify images, it works fine on the test set but then one day in the wild you discover your network classified a turtle as a rifle [0]. Why did it do that? what can we change to fix that, how could we have seen this coming? Those answers won't come easily compared to a more old school system.
Re: Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff
#30> 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 wonder whether a hybrid approach is the future, since in some tasks neural networks are just far better than anything we have. If the only tasks of the neural network is to estimate/classify some sensor-input and is…
I think they are using the wrong word here, I think by "determinism" they mean interpretable. You train your big neural network to classify images, it works fine on the test set but then one day in the wild you discover your network classified a turtle as a rifle [0]. Why did it do that? what can we change to fix that, how could we have seen this coming? Those answers won't come easily compared to a more old school s…
I am reasonably well versed in the whole adversarial-input research. I am not sure whether this is really the problem. It's a tradeoff. This essentially introduces a random chance that you classification will fail (since adversarial input is not constrained to hard-to-classify situations), but while less accurate methods may be more robust to random errors (which is hard to verify for many approaches) but they have a higher likelihood to fail with hard situations.
Doesn't every component in an aircraft have a random chance of failure? There's even a name for one critical component, the Jesus nut.
I don't really get the interpretable argument. I think what you want is to verify it to a reasonable degree.