Microsoft's self-soaring sailplane improves IoT, digital assistants

A machine learning project to build an autonomous sailplane that remains aloft on thermal currents is impressive enough. But the work conducted by Microsoft researchers Andrey Kolobov and Iain Guilliard will also improve the decision making and trustworthiness of IoT devices, personal assistants and autonomous cars. The constraints limiting the computational resource of weight and space imposed by the airframe of the sailplane adds relevance to the many new developments in ubiquitous computing. The autonomous sailplane is controlled by a 160MHz Arm Cortex M4 with 256KB of RAM and 60KB of flash running on batteries that monitor the sensors, run the autopilot and control the servo motors, to which the researchers have added a machine learning model that continuously learns how to autonomously ride the thermal currents. In the these early days of platforms like digital assistants, IoT and autonomous vehicles, there are hundreds of open problems that will be distilled into a handful of scientific questions that first must be answered to build products that match popular visions of them.