So not to be needlessly critical but this is not news. Of course a robot is faster in a known map with perfect state information. They have always been. The problem has always been exactly those two things: static map known beforehand, and perfect state information.
The paper also don’t claim this as the contribution so this article is just… misinformation? I think there’s a word for this, willfully being flabbergasted by basically anything so you can write an article about it.
When before have drone robot quadcopters been faster than the best human drone racers, do you have any examples of that - a source or link? Are you speculating about theory or talking about a real event that happened, aside from this one?
Maybe what you mean is that it’s not surprising, because it was inevitable. That I would completely agree with. But it’s simply not true to say that robots have always been faster than humans. There was a first automated quadcopter that beat skilled humans, and it happened recently, because quadcopters are a recent development, and automated quadcopters are even more recent.
They're not saying perfect drone pilots have always existed. They're saying that designing a perfect drone pilot is easy and not worth making a fuss about.
I'm honestly very surprised that this is the first time it's happened. I would have thought it would have been done years ago. But probably there's not been enough interest to actually do it.
For anyone who finds it as worthless as I do, the original press release the article mangles is at [0] and the DOI of the paper is 10.1126/scirobotics.abh1221.
As for the work, it's one thing to say "Of course a robot is faster in a known map with perfect state information.", it's another thing to actually _build_ a working system.
Research is an incremental process and this seems to be like a meaningful step.
The new part here is that they have found a way to find the optimal path without using simplifications. So in a way, the true progress of the paper is a new mathematical loss minimization technique.
Just because you have all the information doesn't mean you can solve a constraint system before the heat death of the universe. Otherwise, NP hard problems like traveling salesman wouldn't be so scary.
Yea I think this is a bit harsh. I don't think it is quite such a trivial task to figure out when a FPV drone has such degrees of freedom. It can basically change to any direction at any time. Then the known space is the air in the room.The humans are also training on a known course.
A legit drone racing pilot is incredible at this also so it is not like there is a ton of meat on the bone to pick at.
It is cool from the perspective of racing drones even if less impressive from the perspective of AGI or something.
A drone can in fact not accelerate in any direction at any time. It can only accelerate along the thrust vector which is the normal of the plane that the rotors sit on.
That’s a distinction without a difference. In theory, of course you’re correct. In practice, your parent comment is correct.
The rotation rate in the roll or pitch axis is around 1080 degrees per second - 3 complete revolutions per second. Many freestyle pilots fly higher rates than me.
I can, and do, go from 80mph in one direction, flip 180degrees to accelerate back to 80mph in the direction i just came - a 160mph change of speed in around 5-6 seconds approx.
The only axis i cant turn very fast in is yaw (quads have poor yaw authority compared to other axes) but even then it’s fast enough most people would consider it instant.
One thing to keep in mind is that often times those products are serving a real need for niche communities (such as those with disabilities), and marketing them more broadly is simply a way to recoup the costs.
> Of course a robot is faster in a known map with perfect state information. They have always been.
Huhwut?
That would be news to an entire field of engineering, thanks. Please apply for your PhD.
Excluding the fact that whole classes of problems are NP-complete and difficult to compute, there are classes of problems like "How do I fit this odd shape through this odd obstruction?" that don't even lend themselves to being computed well.
The paper also don’t claim this as the contribution so this article is just… misinformation? I think there’s a word for this, willfully being flabbergasted by basically anything so you can write an article about it.