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Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff

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

#31

Post by eruhgfdxxx »

jbangert wrote: post #24
yingw787 wrote: post #16

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 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 helicopte…

Nah, helicopters are relatively simple machines, literally every person in this site can understand the basics of helicopter technology (of course, getting proficient and enabling a career in heli-tech is a whole different story). The only difficulty is making them bulletproof, but nowadays the crashes due to technical problems are rare.

Also, helicopters are generally used for other purposes than planes. Transporting thousands of men thousands of kilometers is probably not a job for helicopters but that does not imply that helicopters are useless.

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

#33

Post by areoform »

LeanderK wrote: post #30
sgillen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Two things;

1) This might be theoretically true, but Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers monitor data on every component at a very fine-grained level and they use inspections to predict what will go bad and when. They're even adding real-time capabilities to it so that parts are replaced immediately after a flight if imminent failure is predicted; https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_...

2) The core issue over here isn't that a component can fail. The issue is that when it fails can we trace the error and forestall it in the future? If the error is something that's unreplicable and unpredictable then that's quite literally impossible and it makes the machine by its very definition untenably unsafe as you don't know when or why it won't work.

Someday neural networks will become a part of safety-critical systems, but this generation of neural networks probably won't be it.

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

#34

Post by yingw787 »

jbangert wrote: post #24
yingw787 wrote: post #16

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 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 helicopte…

I'm less comparing the helicopter approach with airplanes, and more comparing them to multirotors, where I think a lot of the autonomous flight hype is coming from, and where the use cases substitute rather than complement each other. In that sense, the fixed costs are less "baked-in" to the product. You can swap out helicopter blades for better composites, and add in a glass cockpit, but the fundamental control system still holds. You can't really change the number of motors in a multicopter without a full-scale overhaul of the avionics suite. And I sure hope the FAA wouldn't let a multicopter with some number of failed motors take off just because it doesn't immediately fall out of the sky.

I would agree with you operating a helicopter will always be expensive. I don't anticipate autonomous helicopters to be price competitive with something like cars. People pay the premium for vertical flight to gain the benefits of vertical flight. In addition, I'm pretty sure that given the high fixed price, that market would rather pay more to get a premium product rather than accept an inferior product (e.g. insufficient range, speed, flight time, safety, etc). I was more saying making helicopter flights marginally cheaper will make said flights marginally more available to more people.

There might be game changers down the line. For example, Sikorsky has a lot of experience with experimental control systems like hybrid helicopters that may reduce operational expenses, and if they can prove SARA/derivatives are as reliable or better than a human pilot and convince the general public/unions to fly without a pilot, they might design helicopters that are more maintenance-oriented. But as with all things, it's more important to make sure new innovations are deliverable and provably progressive.

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

#35

Post by LeanderK »

areoform wrote: post #33
LeanderK wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Two things; 1) This might be theoretically true, but Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers monitor data on every component at a very fine-grained level and they use inspections to predict what will go bad and when. They're even adding real-time capabilities to it so that parts are…

I convinced that neural network will never be interpretable like code. They will just get even more complex, so to employ them in critical applications (my motivation is more healthcare, where similiar constraints are present. People can die if there's a wrong prediction) we have to build a notion why we allow something and what we don't allow without some human in the loop getting convined that the reasoning itself is sound. I think this boils down to assumptions about robustness (like the l2-norm adversarial examples in image classification) and statistics.

to 1). Neural networks are code, they are always 100% the same if you ship it. So you can test them way more thoughly than some equipment, which (i hope) would allow you to minimze the chance of failure to a reasonable degree.

to 2) "you don't know when or why it won't work." I think a fundamental disagreement lies here. I am convinced that this is not possible with these complex function approximators, where we just optimize them until we are happy. If we adopt a thinking like above, we can retrain the networks with these additional inputs, adjust our notion of robustness and think whether there's a flaw in our statistical assumptions.

But these are just random thoughts. I am in touch with people working in healthcare with this stuff, so there's some exposure to these kinds of problems. But I have never read any work discussing these issues or really reflection whether my reasoning is actually sound.

Maybe I'm wrong and we can somehow make them interpretable in a sense that is actually relevant to verifying them.

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

#36

Post by sandworm101 »

yutyut wrote: post #17
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 difficu…

>> ... everything in your last paragraph could be done with enough good input

Lol. Helicopters are not 747s. They operate very locally and do things that are not as generic as approaching SFO in marginal weather. A helicopter has to change its operations in reaction not to measured weather, but to the specifics of individual trees. Show me a computer that can take the input: "That tree looks like it is about to fall over" and decide whether to continue a rescue or give up and negotiate a new approach. SAR pilots do that daily.

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

#37

Post by yutyut »

sandworm101 wrote: post #36
yutyut wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 difficu…

>> ... everything in your last paragraph could be done with enough good input Lol. Helicopters are not 747s. They operate very locally and do things that are not as generic as approaching SFO in marginal weather. A helicopter has to change its operations in reaction not to measured weather, but to the specifics of individual trees . Show me a computer that can take the input: "That tree looks like it is about to fall…

See above, RE: “sensors”

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

#38

Post by yutyut »

yutyut wrote: post #37
sandworm101 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> ... everything in your last paragraph could be done with enough good input Lol. Helicopters are not 747s. They operate very locally and do things that are not as generic as approaching SFO in marginal weather. A helicopter has to change its operations in reaction not to measured weather, but to the specifics of individual trees . Show me a computer that can take the input: "That tree looks like it is about to fall…

See above, RE: “sensors”

Sorry just being short on a comment that starts with lol. Look at for instance SAR mapping. I can have a “certain curr gen aircraft” SAR map a zone or AO for me and tell me A LOT (UNCLAS/open source).

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

#39

Post by sandworm101 »

yutyut wrote: post #38
yutyut wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See above, RE: “sensors”

Sorry just being short on a comment that starts with lol. Look at for instance SAR mapping. I can have a “certain curr gen aircraft” SAR map a zone or AO for me and tell me A LOT (UNCLAS/open source).

SAR = search and rescue. It is pulling wounded people off cliffs or burning boats.

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

#40

Post by yutyut »

sandworm101 wrote: post #39
yutyut wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry just being short on a comment that starts with lol. Look at for instance SAR mapping. I can have a “certain curr gen aircraft” SAR map a zone or AO for me and tell me A LOT (UNCLAS/open source).

SAR = search and rescue. It is pulling wounded people off cliffs or burning boats.

Synthetic aperture radar. Perhaps the full body of the world’s knowledge extends a bit beyond your small bubble.

Considering the way you lambaste ideas that it is becoming increasingly evident you don’t fully understand, I’d be interested in your credentials.

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