Training drones to fly around obstacles at high speeds

Recommendable! This sounds almost like it could become my next pastime! 😄

"... Now, aerospace engineers at MIT have devised an algorithm that helps drones find the fastest route around obstacles without crashing. The new algorithm combines simulations of a drone flying through a virtual obstacle course with data from experiments of a real drone flying through the same course in a physical space.

The researchers found that a drone trained with their algorithm flew through a simple obstacle course up to 20% faster than a drone trained on conventional planning algorithms. Interestingly, the new algorithm didn’t always keep a drone ahead of its competitor throughout the course. In some cases, it chose to slow a drone down to handle a tricky curve, or save its energy in order to speed up and ultimately overtake its rival. ...
“When you’re flying fast, it’s hard to estimate where you are ... There could be delays in sending a signal to a motor, or a sudden voltage drop which could cause other dynamics problems. These effects can’t be modeled with traditional planning approaches.” ..."

"... we propose a multi-fidelity Bayesian optimization framework that models the feasibility constraints based on analytical approximation, numerical simulation, and real-world flight experiments. By combining evaluations at different fidelities, trajectory time is optimized while the number of costly flight experiments is kept to a minimum. The algorithm is thoroughly evaluated for the trajectory generation problem in two different scenarios: (1) connecting predetermined waypoints; (2) planning in obstacle-rich environments. For each scenario, we conduct both simulation and real-world flight experiments at speeds up to 11 m/s. ..."

Training drones to fly around obstacles at high speeds

Multi-fidelity black-box optimization for time-optimal quadrotor maneuvers (public access)