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Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

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121–130 of 342 posts

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#121
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is understandable pure-logic thinking until you're the one to be made battlefield-relevant. And if you look at Russia your logic does fail on that example - no amount of human losses affect Russia's behavior in the current war as they are sure that Ukraine will run out of soldiers before Russia does. So, from Russia's POV the faster the grinder the sooner their victory.

No. Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it. In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service. This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.

> This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.

Meanwhile Spain suffered an attempted coup in 1981 [0] while mandatory military service was still in place [1]. The conscripts did not play a role in protecting democracy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Service_(Spain)

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#122
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fantastic book, highly recommended.

I tried to read the book and to me it came off as little more than doomer and disaster pornography. I found a lot of the situations to be far fetched and didn't feel like it portrayed a realistic image of how the world works.

Kim Stanley Robinson's books are all like that - a near/mid term crisis you can easily relate with, often caused by climate change, that eventually people rise up to kinda resolve, putting it on a hopeful trajectory. Lots of expressing of human best qualities along the way. Similar to the Culture in this.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#124

I’ve seen AI beat humans in simulations before, but doing it on a real track with the same hardware is honestly kind of amazing. What surprised me the most is they didn’t use any traditional flight controller. They just let the neural network handle the flying. I’m really curious how this would perform in messier, less controlled environments.

A side note, will we still attend and watch Formula 1 races it AI would drive cars (maybe near perfection) ?

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#125
post #26

This is quite cool since past efforts in this direction have usually relied on crutches like outside-in imaging and positioning. A few details I picked up: * The drones are a spec drone across the league. It's a fairly large-footprint FPV racing drone (it's a 5" propped drone, but it's very stretched out and quite heavy) with both a Betaflight flight controller and a Jetson Orin NX onboard. Teams were only allowed an…

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Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it. In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service. This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.

Surely there's a difference between the folks just doing their national service, and the career soldiers (who are the people likely to start a coup)? In actual coups, it's often a small cadre of well-connected higher officers who do the work. It's not the whole military. By the time the whole military (or country) realises what's happened, it's already happened and there's not a lot they can do.

The career soldiers are recruited from people doing their mandatory military service, and upon this, many people having done their mandatory military service are part of the home defence and practice now and then.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#127
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Here in Sweden we instituted mandatory military service we did so because we wanted to ensure that there was no military class that if they decide to can take over. We knew the cost, and the cost is worth it. In normal times the cost is simply to do ones mandatory military service. This protects against coups, ensures your power in society and prevents groups of officers and soldiers etc. from taking over.

Man, with all the respect to Sweden, you're in your own [very high] class.

I feel we're behind the Swiss, and want to imitate them.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#128
post #26

This is quite cool since past efforts in this direction have usually relied on crutches like outside-in imaging and positioning. A few details I picked up: * The drones are a spec drone across the league. It's a fairly large-footprint FPV racing drone (it's a 5" propped drone, but it's very stretched out and quite heavy) with both a Betaflight flight controller and a Jetson Orin NX onboard. Teams were only allowed an…

It used a small RL trained network running on the flight controllers MCU directly that controlled the motors given state (position, orientation ...) inputs. The Jetson handled vision processing.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#129

I remember being blown away by a TED talk were "minimum snap trajectories" are planned for quadcopters to fly through hoops and slots. It's really cool to see this happening fully autonomously and at such high speed. I wonder if the use of AI means that the approach is fundamentally different, or if it uses the same principle of minimizing snap? https://www.ted.com/talks/vijay_kumar_robots_that_fly_and_co...

It's fundamentally different, it's using an RL trained network that gets the drone state (position, orientation, velocity) as input and directly outputs motor commands.
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