New Algorithm Flies Drones Faster than Human Racing Pilots
upstart writes:
New Algorithm Flies Drones Faster than Human Racing Pilots:
The best human drone pilots are very good [...] and have so far always outperformed autonomous systems in drone racing. Now, a research group at the University of Zurich (UZH) has created an algorithm that can find the quickest trajectory to guide a quadrotor - a drone with four propellers - through a series of waypoints on a circuit. Our drone beat the fastest lap of two world-class human pilots on an experimental race track", says Davide Scaramuzza, who heads the Robotics and Perception Group at UZH and the Rescue Robotics Grand Challenge of the NCCR Robotics, which funded the research.
The novelty of the algorithm is that it is the first to generate time-optimal trajectories that fully consider the drones' limitations", says Scaramuzza.
[...] The researchers had the algorithm and two human pilots fly the same quadrotor through a race circuit. They employed external cameras to precisely capture the motion of the drones and - in the case of the autonomous drone - to give real-time information to the algorithm on where the drone was at any moment. To ensure a fair comparison, the human pilots were given the opportunity to train on the circuit before the race. But the algorithm won: all its laps were faster than the human ones, and the performance was more consistent.
Journal Reference:
Philipp Foehn, Angel Romero, Davide Scaramuzza. Time-optimal planning for quadrotor waypoint flight [$], Science Robotics (DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.abh1221)
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