原创译文 | 研究人员利用虚拟现实技术训练人工智能无人机，减少无人驾驶汽车的碰撞

麻省理工学院的研究人员开发了一种技术，可以利用VR增强的环境来训练快速移动的人工智能无人机，减少碰撞，从而减少维修或更换的需要。该系统名为“飞行护目镜”，将在本周在澳大利亚布里斯班举行的IEEE机器人与自动化国际会议上详细介绍。

飞行护目镜使自动飞行器在实际的空旷空间中运动时，能够从虚拟环境中看到并学习。该系统跟踪一架无人机的运动，呈现其当前虚拟位置的每秒钟90帧的真实图像，并迅速将图像传送到无人机的图像处理器上。研究人员塞达克·卡拉曼告诉《麻省理工学院新闻》说：“无人机将在一个空房间里飞行，但会在完全不同的环境中‘产生幻觉’，并将在那种环境中学习。”

卡拉曼说，团队的灵感来自于一种想要制造一种无人驾驶飞机的愿望，在竞争性无人机竞赛中，这种无人机可以胜过人类控制的无人机，其中包括有窗户、门和其他障碍物的迷宫。通过构建迷宫的虚拟版本，并让无人机在障碍物上行驶，它可以比人类尝试同样的动作更快地学会移动。

测试表明飞行护目镜的练习是有价值的。无人机以每小时5英里的速度通过10次飞行中成功飞越了一个虚拟现实窗口361次，“坠毁”只有3次，没有造成实际的损坏。然后，在8次飞行的实际测试中，无人机能够在实际的窗户上飞行119次，只需要6次撞击或需要人工干预。传统的测试需要更多的预防措施，更不用说备件和整个无人机的费用了。

卡拉曼说:“当你想要进行高通量计算和快速运行的时候，即使你对环境做了哪怕是最细微的改变，都会导致无人机坠毁。”在那种环境下你不能学习。如果你想突破你的运行速度和计算速度，你需要一些虚拟现实环境。

飞行护目镜系统最初是为无人机设计的，但它在地面自主飞行器上也有明显的潜在应用。使用动作捕捉技术和虚拟现实技术，可以将移动的人和假的物体插入到人工智能车辆的学习路径中，以训练它们避开现实世界的障碍。毫不奇怪，麻省理工学院的研究人员得到了对下一代汽车人工智能感兴趣的机构的支持，包括英伟达、美国海军研究办公室和麻省理工学院林肯实验室。

原文

Researchers use VR to train AI drones, cutting autonomous vehicle crashes

MIT researchers have developed a technique to train fast-moving autonomous AI drones using VR-enhanced environments, reducing crashes and thereby the need for repairs or replacements. Known as “Flight Goggles,” the system will be detailed at this week’s IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Brisbane, Australia.

Flight Goggles enables autonomous vehicles to see and learn from virtual environments while they’re actually moving in physically empty spaces. The system tracks a drone’s motion, renders 90-frame-per-second photorealistic imagery of its current virtual location, and quickly transmits the images to the drone’s image processor. Researcher Sertac Karaman told MIT News (via Road to VR) that “the drone will be flying in an empty room, but will be ‘hallucinating’ a completely different environment, and will learn in that environment.”

Karaman said that the team was inspired by a desire to build an autonomous drone that could outperform human-controlled drones in competitive drone races, which include mazes with windows, doors, and other obstacles. By building virtual versions of mazes and letting the drone practice navigating the obstacles, it could learn to move faster than a human attempting the same maneuvers.

Testing suggests that Flight Goggles practice is valuable. Moving at 5 mph through 10 flights, the drone successfully flew through a virtual reality window 361 times and “crashed” only three times, causing no actual damage. Then, in real testing across eight flights, the drone was able to fly through an actual window 119 times, only crashing or requiring human intervention six times. Traditional testing requires far more precautions to be taken, to say nothing of the expenses of spare parts and whole drones.

“The moment you want to do high-throughput computing and go fast,” Karaman said, “even the slightest changes you make to its environment will cause the drone to crash. You can’t learn in that environment. If you want to push boundaries on how fast you can go and compute, you need some sort of virtual-reality environment.”

The Flight Goggles system is initially intended for aerial drones, but it also has obvious potential applications with ground-based autonomous vehicles. Using motion capture and VR technologies, moving people and fake objects can be inserted into the learning paths of AI-powered vehicles to train them to avoid real-world obstacles. Not surprisingly, the MIT researchers were backed by institutions interested in next-generation vehicle AI, including Nvidia, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

文章编辑：小柳

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