“FLY, DRONE, FLY!”

Right now, it takes months of train­ing to learn how to remote-​​control a fly­ing drone. And often, the guys behind the joy­stick already have their pilot’s wings.
But some research over at MIT may be start­ing to change that. A group of PhD can­di­dates there have fig­ured out a way to let a pilot in one plane guide an unmanned air­craft, just by telling the drone what to do, in plain English. It’s part of a Darpa-​​funded study we first men­tioned over the sum­mer.

In a flight test, the pilot­less vehi­cle, called a UAV (unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle), responded to sud­den changes in plan and avoided unex­pected threats en route to its des­ti­na­tion, in real time.
“The sys­tem allows the pilot to inter­face with the UAV at a high level–not just ‘turn right, turn left’ but ‘fly to this region and per­form this task,’” said Mario Valenti, a flight con­trols engi­neer for Boeing who is on leave to pur­sue a Ph.D. in elec­tri­cal engi­neer­ing and com­puter sci­ence at MIT. “The pilot essen­tially treats the UAV as a wing­man,” said Valenti, com­par­ing the UAV to a com­pan­ion pilot in a fighter-​​plane squadron.
Three ele­ments com­bine to make MIT’s manned-​​to-​​unmanned air vehi­cle guid­ance sys­tem more flex­i­ble and more “intel­li­gent” than pre­vi­ous sys­tems. First, the team worked with Teragram Corp., a soft­ware com­pany spe­cial­iz­ing in lan­guage tech­nol­ogy, to cre­ate a natural-​​language inter­face through which the two vehi­cles com­mu­ni­cate and coor­di­nate their actions. The inter­face trans­lates the pilot’s human lan­guage into the UAV’s machine lan­guage, and vice versa. “It allows us to task machines at a higher level, improv­ing safety and effi­ciency,” said Feron.
Second, Valenti designed a task sched­uler that keeps track of the oft-​​changing mis­sion data from the manned vehi­cle and inter­prets it into tasks the UAV can per­form. The task sched­uler is inte­grated with the third ele­ment, [a] safe-​​trajectory-​​planning algo­rithm… [which] enable[s] the UAV to choose the fastest safe path to its destination–and then change course in a split sec­ond when faced with a new com­mand or a sud­den obstacle. (via Boing Boing)

November 5th, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.