Drone Uses AI and 11,500 Crashes to Learn How to Fly

"Learning to Fly by Crashing," a paper from CMU roboticists Dhiraj Gandhi, Lerrel Pinto, and Abhinav Gupta, has such a nice abstract that I'll just let them explain what this research is all about: The reason most research avoids using large-scale real data is the fear of crashes! In this paper, we propose to bite the bullet and collect a dataset of crashes itself! We build a drone whose sole purpose is to crash into objects [. . We use all this negative flying data in conjunction with positive data sampled from the same trajectories to learn a simple yet powerful policy for UAV navigation. One way to think of flying (or driving or walking or any other form of motion) is that success is simply a continual failure to crash.