Autonomous Drone Racing With The Drone Racing League



Recently @Drone Racing League and @Lockheed Martin visited Austin, Texas as part of a series of drone races that pitted man against machine. The AIRR racing series stands for Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing and took place this fall in four US cities. This drone racing series brought together teams of programmers from around the world to compete for a one million dollar prize. Each team was given an identical drone to work with and had to program it to complete a course using code only as its pilot – no human interaction at all with the drone. And the winner of each AI race then had to race against a human pilot, in this case @Gab707 from @Drone Racing League
This entire event is part of the @Lockheed Martin AlphaPilot program, designed to foster innovation in the artificial intelligence and aviation worlds. Hundreds of teams initially applied and it was whittled down to just 9. Those teams competed until finally MAVLAB won the competition. But could the AI drone beat @Gab707 – watch this video to find out and to learn more about AI drone racing!

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10 Comments

  1. One by one race times may be boring and not sure if the sport were to take off, get it "take off"…. yeah, I know, I now sound like Ken H.
    The bigger challenge for AI racing would be the avoidance of other drones while racing the course. it is possible for each drone to communicate real-time positioning to each other but think about the complexities of managing AI priorities as each drone jockeys for the lead position. Hmmmmmm…….

  2. That's pretty freaking wild and a little scary there getting to high tech with all this computer junk and with this AI stuff crazy stuff but kinda cool at the same time thanks for sharing kelly see you next video

  3. Wow, A $1 million dollar purse. The guys over at Skydio should get into that competition (just kidding or am I?) Thanks Kelly for sharing. Someday all us pilots will be replaced with AI. LOL.
    Actually, I think humans will always be piloting for hobby fun. But for commercial operations, I think autonomous flight planned missions like Drone Link (except for maybe first responder situations or other very specialized mission), will become the norm and most possibly mandated by the FAA. Happy Holidays!

  4. I used Droneblocks a bit just playing around , but it does what you tell it . The sensors on the Mavic and Phantom use something like that to presion land .

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