Sep 01
Christopher Pray, who was previously charged with attempted murder and other crimes, was last seen driving south on Interstate 5, the Oregon State Police said.
Sep 01
A Pig Kidney Has Now Survived Inside a Human Body for Six Weeks and Counting
Posted in: Today's Chili
Surgeons at New York University have reportedly reached another milestone in making pig-to-human organ transplants a reality. They now claim to have transplanted a genetically engineered pig kidney that has survived inside a human body for six weeks and counting—the longest period yet. It’s likely that larger clinical…
Sep 01
The Disney Lorcana trading card game arrived with a massive splash at Gen Con this year, with people staying in line overnight to get booster packs. The high demand continued after the convention, and now a Ravensburger spokesperson tells io9 that “additional booster product” will be arriving at local gaming stores in…
Sep 01
NASA’s trusty Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has captured images revealing a fresh crater on the Moon’s surface. This crater is suspected to be the impact site of the ill-fated Luna 25 mission, Russia’s first lunar attempt in nearly five decades.
Sep 01
Students, teachers, and vintage TV screencappers, the Chrome browser has a new feature that makes taking screenshots of scenes easier than before. Google used a blog post about helpful classroom tools to subtly announce the ability to copy a frame from a video. It’s available in the latest release of Chrome and will…
Sep 01
How perfect of a match was Harrison Ford’s stunt double on the set of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny? The stunt double could literally unlock Ford’s phone with Face ID. This is just one of the fascinating, but not always essential, facts we enjoyed in a brand new making-of documentary.
Sep 01
Meta, the maker of Facebook and Instagram, introduced a new privacy setting Thursday that lets you ask, pretty please, for the company not to use your data to train its AI models.
Sep 01
Meta’s Oversight Board, the Supreme Court-like entity tasked with reviewing Facebook and Instagram’s most contentious content moderation conundrums, is taking on a case involving a bizarre and unpleasant mashup: a Nazi Squidward meme.
Sep 01
Two things are really shaking up Hollywood these days: labor unions and Taylor Swift. Thursday morning Swift announced that she was entering the fall movie season by releasing a nearly three-hour film based on her blockbuster Eras Tour. The news sent mobs of fans to online ticket sites and fear down the spines of…
Sep 01
In what can only bode poorly for our species’ survival during the inevitable robot uprisings, an AI system has once again outperformed the people who trained it. This time, researchers at the University of Zurich in partnership with Intel, pitted their “Swift” AI piloting system against a trio of world champion drone racers — none of whom could best its top time.
Swift is the culmination of years of AI and machine learning research by the University of Zurich. In 2021, the team set an earlier iteration of the flight control algorithm that used a series of external cameras to validate its position in space in real-time, against amateur human pilots, all of whom were easily overmatched in every lap of every race during the test. That result was a milestone in its own right as, previously, self-guided drones relied on simplified physics models to continually calculate their optimum trajectory, which severely lowered their top speed.
This week’s result is another milestone, not just because the AI bested people whose job is to fly drones fast, but because it did so without the cumbersome external camera arrays= of its predecessor. The Swift system “reacts in real time to the data collected by an onboard camera, like the one used by human racers,” an UZH Zurich release reads. It uses an integrated inertial measurement unit to track acceleration and speed while an onboard neural network localizes its position in space using data from the front-facing cameras. All of that data is fed into a central control unit — itself a deep neural network — which crunches through the numbers and devises a shortest/fastest path around the track.
“Physical sports are more challenging for AI because they are less predictable than board or video games. We don’t have a perfect knowledge of the drone and environment models, so the AI needs to learn them by interacting with the physical world,” Davide Scaramuzza, head of the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, said in a statement.
Rather than let a quadcopter smash its way around the track for the month that its controller AI would need to slowly learned the various weaves and bobs of the circuit, the research team instead simulated that learning session virtually. It took all of an hour. And then the drone went to work against 2019 Drone Racing League champion Alex Vanover, 2019 MultiGP Drone Racing champion Thomas Bitmatta, and three-time Swiss champion, Marvin Schaepper.
Swift notched the fastest lap overall, beating the humans by a half second, though the meatsack pilots proved more adaptable to changing conditions during the course of a race. “Drones have a limited battery capacity; they need most of their energy just to stay airborne. Thus, by flying faster we increase their utility,” Scaramuzza said. As such, the research team hopes to continue developing the algorithm for eventual use in Search and Rescue operations, as well as forest monitoring, space exploration, and in film production.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/an-ai-pilot-has-beaten-three-champion-drone-racers-at-their-own-game-190537914.html?src=rss
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