Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

tudelft.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 342 posts

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#201

Post by frakt0x90 »

shinycode wrote: post #124
Leo-thorne wrote: post #100

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) ?

Yes. People thought computers would kill chess, but despite current chess engines being able to trounce every human in existence, chess is more popular than ever.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#202

Post by tremon »

arrowsmith wrote: post #170
optomas wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, if you are smart enough to fashion this without being caught, you are too smart to do something like that. Plus, you got a cool and potentially lucrative hobby, designing exterminator machines. Why bother with children at that point? There are much, much better targets to be had. Your point on the dwindling barrier to implementation stands.

"Most people don't want to murder innocents" isn't reassuring. It only takes one lunatic. And there's a lot of lunatics out there.

Then the proper solution is to create fewer lunatics: provide better mental health support, good social safety nets, and a more egalitarian society.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#203

Post by mschuster91 »

ashoeafoot wrote: post #198
mschuster91 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why Afghanistan, in terms of outcomes, is essentially the strongest military nation in the world. They've defeated both the US and the USSR in spite of being orders of magnitude behind in every single measure of military strength - except for morale. The problem is, in Afghanistan the Western nations didn't do much else than depose the Taliban that took around two years and provide education abilities for w…

There is no Afghanistan . There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed by warlords. "Afghanistan" hallucinated by the us, as a state does not exist and never has.

> There is a area, with tribes, in small medieval villages divided into patriarchal famuly clans governed by warlords.

Germany used to be the same until 1871, a loose federation of fiefdoms that regularly went to war amongst each other. Fun fact, the tariff region structure [1] very much resembles a map from what was "Germany" before then [2].

It's not impossible to turn a bunch of small fiefdoms into one powerful entity. All you need is a compelling story and, as I wrote in this thread, some sort of economic incentive/perspective that actually shows to the population that the new government is actually better for their individual lives than what was before.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/c18q0r/das_heilige_tari...

[2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Heiliges_R%C3%B6misches_...

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#204

Post by MetaWhirledPeas »

jajko wrote: post #168
randomtoast wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Great Britain just announced plans to deliver 100,000 of them to Ukraine. Ukraine lacks the manpower compared to Russia. It seems logical to strengthen their forces by deploying these flying mini terminators. I believe we are not far from large-scale drone warfare. In World War II, we had epic tank and aircraft battles; now, the time has come for autonomous drone battlefields.

[flagged]

I hope this scares nations away from warfare altogether, given the unpredictability of outcomes with heavy drone usage. Even China: they may have a lot of the little buggers, but that Ukraine attack took a lot of scheming. I doubt China can out-manufacture human and AI trickery.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#205

Post by durandal1 »

bri3d wrote: 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…

Also, this track looks nothing like a competitive drone race track, the obstacles are easier and it seems designed to cater to the autonomous drones.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#206

Post by bri3d »

durandal1 wrote: post #205
bri3d wrote: 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…

Also, this track looks nothing like a competitive drone race track, the obstacles are easier and it seems designed to cater to the autonomous drones.

It’s DCL, they’re all kind of poor like this IMO. Certainly nothing like MultiGP

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#207

Post by zemvpferreira »

frakt0x90 wrote: post #201
shinycode wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes. People thought computers would kill chess, but despite current chess engines being able to trounce every human in existence, chess is more popular than ever.

That said “regular” chess is deeply in crisis, with less computer-assisted formats coming up to challenge it.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#208

Post by npilk »

miki123211 wrote: post #146

This makes me wonder what the "best" vehicle for human racing would be like, if there was no requirement for a human driver. Let's say your task is to move a human from A to B (by a pre-designated route) as fast as possible. The only conditions are vehicle weight, no outside radio contact and no damaging the road (assume each vehicle goes separately, so e.g. slip stream effects don't matter). You can rely on the huma…

Not exactly what you're after, but similar: https://what-if.xkcd.com/116/

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#209

Post by htrp »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #37
stackedinserter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH there's no mass adoption of autonomous drones after 3+ years of real active war between two technologically advanced nations.

Are you sure? One of the theories for why there were tires on top of the russian planes that were bombed is that it confuses automatic targeting systems by breaking up the profile of the airplane used in automatic target recognition systems. Hell, even hobbyist level DIY drone stuff can be easily programmed to run an autonomous route with or without a radio link connection. This is a huge reason that GPS is just cons…

If you can get a GPS fix (or a lat long to start), you can run an INS just as easily.

Re: Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first

#210

Post by itishappy »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #195
itishappy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had no prior knowledge of the course.

I don't think so. The article says the race track was controlled by the race organisers but not that it wasn't known to the participants before the race. Anyway given the state of the art, flying autonomously at great speeds and beating human champions without pre-training, i.e. on an unknown race track, would be a much bigger breakthrough than just beating some human champions (which has already happened except in a…

Shoot, you're totally right. They had no prior knowledge before the event, but I don't know how they teach it the course. There's more than one gate visible at a time, so they must do something to fine-tune it.

That being said, I'm sure they have a base model too, so I'm right back to wondering about the parent question: would it work if you set it down in front of a few fresh gates?

Post reply on HN