
Sikorsky’s autonomous helicopter tech is ready for takeoff - yurisagalov
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2019/3/5/18250996/sikorsky-autonomous-helicopter-flying-taxi-lockheed
======
stefs
> But SARA doesn’t rely as much on “high-order” functions like AI since those
> are harder to certify. (“To be FAA certifiable, you need a certain level of
> determinism in the outcomes,” Van Buiten says.)

i've just recently finished peter watts "freeze frame revolution" of the
sunflower cycle, where the gate-building spaceship eriophora is mostly on its
own for thousands of years while the crew sleeps, guided by an AI called "the
chimp".

\-- spoilers --

one of the key ideas in this book is that the ships AI - the chimp - is not
advanced at all, with a synapse count of roughly the chimp. anything more
intelligent would get unstable and develop its own motives, so the original
builders constructed it to be comparatively dumb and thus stable, predictable
and deterministic (the humans are woken up only in case something unexpected
happens which requires more creativity and brainpower).

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LeanderK
> But SARA doesn’t rely as much on “high-order” functions like AI since those
> are harder to certify. (“To be FAA certifiable, you need a certain level of
> determinism in the outcomes,” Van Buiten says.)

I wonder whether a hybrid approach is the future, since in some tasks neural
networks are just far better than anything we have. If the only tasks of the
neural network is to estimate/classify some sensor-input and is trained in a
purely supervised setting, the "right thing" for the neural network is still
pretty well defined and rigorous testing should be possible (simple tasks can
be very complex to implement). Then, interpretable, high-level reasoning could
be solved by old-school coding (and maybe verifying).

This is not possible with end-to-end training.

But I am not sure what they mean, normally neural network (and their training)
is purely deterministic. It's not that they are just very good at rolling a
dice.

I am not into this stuff (autonomous, "intelligent" systems, more the data-
analysis guy), but I would use neural networks for simple to define, hard
problems that involve a lot of noisy data (where some kind of accuracy on some
test-set is a well-defined metric) and then build a higher-level reasing
system by hand.

~~~
sgillen
I think they are using the wrong word here, I think by "determinism" they mean
interpretable. You train your big neural network to classify images, it works
fine on the test set but then one day in the wild you discover your network
classified a turtle as a rifle [0]. Why did it do that? what can we change to
fix that, how could we have seen this coming? Those answers won't come easily
compared to a more old school system.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07397](https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.07397)

~~~
LeanderK
I am reasonably well versed in the whole adversarial-input research. I am not
sure whether this is really the problem. It's a tradeoff. This essentially
introduces a random chance that you classification will fail (since
adversarial input is not constrained to hard-to-classify situations), but
while less accurate methods may be more robust to random errors (which is hard
to verify for many approaches) but they have a higher likelihood to fail with
hard situations.

Doesn't every component in an aircraft have a random chance of failure?
There's even a name for one critical component, the Jesus nut.

I don't really get the interpretable argument. I think what you want is to
verify it to a reasonable degree.

~~~
areoform
> Doesn't every component in an aircraft have a random chance of failure?
> There's even a name for one critical component, the Jesus nut.

Two things;

1) This might be theoretically true, but Boeing and other aircraft
manufacturers monitor data on every component at a very fine-grained level and
they use inspections to predict what will go bad and when. They're even adding
real-time capabilities to it so that parts are replaced immediately after a
flight if imminent failure is predicted;
[https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_...](https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/articles/qtr_3_07/AERO_Q307_article4.pdf)

2) The core issue over here isn't that a component can fail. The issue is that
when it fails can we trace the error and forestall it in the future? If the
error is something that's unreplicable and unpredictable then that's quite
literally impossible and it makes the machine by its very definition untenably
unsafe as you don't know when or why it won't work.

Someday neural networks will become a part of safety-critical systems, but
this generation of neural networks probably won't be it.

~~~
LeanderK
I convinced that neural network will never be interpretable like code. They
will just get even more complex, so to employ them in critical applications
(my motivation is more healthcare, where similiar constraints are present.
People can die if there's a wrong prediction) we have to build a notion why we
allow something and what we don't allow without some human in the loop getting
convined that the reasoning itself is sound. I think this boils down to
assumptions about robustness (like the l2-norm adversarial examples in image
classification) and statistics.

to 1). Neural networks are code, they are always 100% the same if you ship it.
So you can test them way more thoughly than some equipment, which (i hope)
would allow you to minimze the chance of failure to a reasonable degree.

to 2) "you don't know when or why it won't work." I think a fundamental
disagreement lies here. I am convinced that this is not possible with these
complex function approximators, where we just optimize them until we are
happy. If we adopt a thinking like above, we can retrain the networks with
these additional inputs, adjust our notion of robustness and think whether
there's a flaw in our statistical assumptions.

But these are just random thoughts. I am in touch with people working in
healthcare with this stuff, so there's some exposure to these kinds of
problems. But I have never read any work discussing these issues or really
reflection whether my reasoning is actually sound.

Maybe I'm wrong and we can somehow make them interpretable in a sense that is
actually relevant to verifying them.

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yingw787
I think Sikorsky's probably ahead in the race for realistic autonomous flight.
Sikorsky isn't a trendy/hot company by any means, but they're reliable, they
deliver, and they have the contact infrastructure with FAA and NTSB and other
government certification orgs that would handle this new development. I don't
know if they'd offer "air-taxis", but decreasing the cost of helicopter travel
so that a seed/Series A startup CEO can travel vs. the Fortune 500 CEOs would
be a major improvement in and of itself.

~~~
jbangert
I don't think the pilot factors in that much into the cost of operating a
helicopter. Even a small helicopter (e.g. Robinson R-44 which is a bare bones
trainer) needs a ~250k complete overhaul every 2200 hours/12 years in service.
Add $60 dollars per hour in fuel and 60-100 per hour of miscellaneous other
maintenance, and your variable costs quickly approach 300/hr. Add in all the
fixed overhead, and a tiny helicopter that can take 2 passengers and limited
baggage will run $400 dollars per hour easily (which is about what they rent
for). A bigger turbine helicopter is significantly more expensive.

Most of this is because helicopters are complex machines (you're spinning
really big blades pretty fast. Then using the blades + bearing to also lift
the weight of the helicopter + more. Oh and you're changing the pitch angle of
the blades. Oh you mean changing the pitch angles of the blades WHILE THEY GO
AROUND...) and any failure in any of these parts is usually fatal so they have
to be built and maintained to a very high degree of reliability.

Airplanes are much simpler (the spinning propeller attached to an engine is
one part. The wing generating lift is another part. the flight controls are
yet another part) and have more opportunities for redundancy ( a wing has
multiple spars, and is attached to the airplane with _many_ bolts. All
helicopter blades meet in one hub, which is attached on one axis).

Combine that with aircraft scaling up more (you can build 500 person aircraft,
but only 20 person or so helicopters), going much faster (a 120 dollar/hr
propeller plane will outrun many/most helicopters) and the cost to go a given
distance by plane will always be much cheaper than a helicopter.

~~~
yingw787
I'm less comparing the helicopter approach with airplanes, and more comparing
them to multirotors, where I think a lot of the autonomous flight hype is
coming from, and where the use cases substitute rather than complement each
other. In that sense, the fixed costs are less "baked-in" to the product. You
can swap out helicopter blades for better composites, and add in a glass
cockpit, but the fundamental control system still holds. You can't really
change the number of motors in a multicopter without a full-scale overhaul of
the avionics suite. And I sure hope the FAA wouldn't let a multicopter with
some number of failed motors take off just because it doesn't immediately fall
out of the sky.

I would agree with you operating a helicopter will always be expensive. I
don't anticipate autonomous helicopters to be price competitive with something
like cars. People pay the premium for vertical flight to gain the benefits of
vertical flight. In addition, I'm pretty sure that given the high fixed price,
that market would rather pay more to get a premium product rather than accept
an inferior product (e.g. insufficient range, speed, flight time, safety,
etc). I was more saying making helicopter flights marginally cheaper will make
said flights marginally more available to more people.

There might be game changers down the line. For example, Sikorsky has a lot of
experience with experimental control systems like hybrid helicopters that may
reduce operational expenses, and if they can prove SARA/derivatives are as
reliable or better than a human pilot and convince the general public/unions
to fly without a pilot, they might design helicopters that are more
maintenance-oriented. But as with all things, it's more important to make sure
new innovations are deliverable and provably progressive.

------
readhn
Sikorsky's story is really fascinating to me. 4 years after immigrating from
Russia he founded an aviation company in USA. And in 15 years he was already
building airplanes and then first ever helicopter!
([https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Igor_Sik...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Igor_Sikorsky_300.jpg))

If he stayed in Russia the course of human history might have been very
different ... if he was developing all that technology for the USSR... and not
USA.

tell me about boot strapping!! :

"In 1923, Sikorsky formed the Sikorsky Manufacturing Company in Roosevelt, New
York.[36] He was helped by several former Russian military officers. Among
Sikorsky's chief supporters was composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who introduced
himself by writing a check for US$5,000 (approximately $61,000 in 2007).[37]
Although his prototype was damaged in its first test flight, Sikorsky
persuaded his reluctant backers to invest another $2,500. With the additional
funds, he produced the S-29, one of the first twin-engine aircraft in America,
with a capacity for 14 passengers and a speed of 115 mph.[38] The performance
of the S-29, slow compared to military aircraft of 1918, proved to be a "make
or break" moment for Sikorsky's funding."

~~~
eugene-s
> If he stayed in Russia the course of human history might have been very
> different... if he was developing all that technology for the USSR... and
> not USA.

I have serious doubts about this. His talents might be lost for humanity
completely. Post-revolution and before WW2 there were a lot of constructors
and engineers who were prosecuted, displaced or even worse by the Soviets.

The wikipedia says "After the Bolshevik revolution began in 1917, Igor
Sikorsky fled his homeland, because the new government threatened to shoot
him." (the citation link is broken, unfortunately).

This reminds me of Sergey Korolev's history. He was basically the father of
Soviet rocket-building. He has survived the purges by pure luck. The leaders
of his institute were executed, he was tortured to get the confession, lost
his teeth, went through the gulag and got back. How many of these talented
people ended up being not so lucky is hard to imagine.

Even the work results might not have protected them. For example, take the
chief engineer of T-34 engine
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Chelpan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Chelpan).
He got awarded for the invention, arrested and executed the next year, and
then rehabilitated a few years later. There were so many stories like these.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
Similar also to the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in China, many
scientists and other intellectuals never came back from those camps[1].
Presumably modern China would look quite different if that hadn't been the
case.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education)

------
sandworm101
>> Flying a helicopter requires such an intense mental load, he says, that
even small things like pushing the “talk” button can put a novice pilot in
peril.

No they are not that hard to fly. A bare-bones helicopter with nothing more
than the minimum parts to qualify as a helicopter is indeed an unsteady beast.
But such helicopters are rare, used mostly for training purposes. Modern
machines, even ancient ones, have things like gyroscopes to take much of the
load off the pilot. And autopilots really do work (auto, not autonomous). They
can hold a steady heading/alt. Feed them data from a radar altimeter and they
can hover like a rock.

The computers can fly the aircraft, they can literally make it move as needed,
but that is a totally different problem than deciding _where_ to move the
aircraft. The pilot's job is making the judgement calls necessary to keep the
aircraft safe. Show me a computer than can determine whether an approach is
safe enough to execute, whether the weather en route is acceptable. Show me a
computer than an judge which path to take to avoid carrying an unsteady slung
load over someone's head.

~~~
tome
This is really interesting and surprising to me. Can any helicopter pilot
explain why hovering is not as easy as just taking your hands off the
controls? That's how I always imagined a helicopter would work!

~~~
sandworm101
A hover isn't as dynamic as forward flight. A fixed-wing aircraft like a
glider can self-regulate using aerodynamic forces. For instance: If the nose
tips up, the plane slows. The wings generate less lift and the nose tips back
down. Plane then speeds up ... etc. But a hovering helicopter doesn't
experience any significant airflow changes. If it's nose tips up it just keeps
tipping up. The helo then starts sliding backwards until the tail catches the
wind, spinning everything 180 like a weather vain and very quickly you aren't
flying any more. The pilot/computer/gyro needs to keep ahead of these forces.

------
avgeek808
Urban air mobility space is heating up. Blade and Sikorsky's AAG announced an
agreement to provide a new on-demand urban mobility option to the NYC area.
Uber has their Elevate team working on this problem as well. Blade launched an
urban mobility pilot program in the Bay Area last week. Received an early,
invite code from a friend last week, SF-3FTPTV.

------
samlittlewood
Also Leonardo (Agusta-Westland) -[https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-
news/business-aviation/20...](https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-
news/business-aviation/2018-02-28/leonardo-solo-makes-first-unmanned-flight)

------
tnash
I'm impressed with what they've been able to do, and happy to see that they're
developing in-house. When I was an intern there in the mid-2000's they were
still working on fly-by-wire and most (all?) of their programming was done by
a separate company.

------
mhb
Related: Where's My Flying Car? Coming in for a Landing Soon

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318425)

~~~
dogma1138
A flying car isn't useful for the military or anyone else for that matter this
one is.

