Drones for Disaster Relief

Here looking at how drones can react and recover from disaster disruptions to provide ongoing support.

Could Nearly Invincible Drone Be the Future of Disaster Relief?
USC Viterbi News
By Caitlin Dawson

At the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, researchers have developed autonomous drones that can recover from collisions and other disruptions. Using reinforcement learning to train the controller that stabilizes the drones in simulation mode, the researchers presented randomized challenges to the controller until it learned to navigate them. The researchers tested the controller by subjecting them to disruptions like kicking and pushing; the drones were able to recover 90% of the time. Viterbi’s Gaurav Sukhatme said the research resolves two important issues in robotics: robustness (“if you’re building a flight control system, it can’t be brittle and fall apart when something goes wrong”), and generalization (“sometimes you might build a very safe system, but it will be very specialized”). ... '