Artificial Intelligence Drones: A drone is a type of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, controlled remotely by a person or autonomously by computers. There are different drones applications with artificial intelligence. In general, we can find them in three main groups: military, industry, and commercial.
Drones are not only a particular toy, but their applications are very diverse and sophisticated. Such as monitoring infrastructure, a shipment of products, extinction of forest fires, exploration of mining material, mapping of an agricultural area, mapping of an industrial area, and temperature control.
The drones with Artificial Intelligence are able to process data in bulk and faster, which helps decision – making. In other words, drones produce large amounts of data, which in turn are collected. With the existence of artificial intelligence (AI), this data is processed faster, more precisely, and provides new knowledge. The most significant advantage is the ease of evaluating results.
In this article, we will see a brief definition of what AI is, what AI technologies are involved in drones. And some of the most surprising use cases.
Drones with Artificial Intelligence
The fourth industrial revolution is totally linked to technology, more specifically, with the use of Artificial Intelligence. AI describes machines’ ability to perform complex tasks that have characteristics of human intelligence and includes reasoning, problem-solving, planning, learning and understanding, and reading of human languages. Just like you can do that with the help of Gantt charts.
To understand the AI concept, let’s think for a moment about a girl or a boy’s entire learning process. An expert teaches by repetition, associating words with objects until the subject manages to identify the same object by himself.
As we know, all human beings’ capacities are not only to identify objects; over the years, we acquire more and more complex skills. We extract patterns of behavior from our own routines, for example, deciding what to cook. A priori, it seems like a simple task because we have already done it repeatedly. But we do not realize all the small decisions that we have learned to identify until we reach the final decision.
If we have daughters and sons, we will think about what ingredients they like, what we ate the days before, what we have available in the fridge, if it is someone’s birthday at home, etc. All these learning processes, improvement, feature extraction, and pattern recognition are part of AI when talking about machines.
Artificial Intelligence Applications in Drones
The application of AI in drones is extensive. To understand the different problems it covers, we will see an example of some of the technologies that a drone needs to be piloted autonomously and make decisions independently. Also, the hottest topics in AI are machine learning, deep learning, and motion planning. So they will be the focus of this publication.
The use of Motion Planning (MP) is to detect and recognize objects such as people, cyclists, or any other type of vehicle and to make suitable flight routes. This gives the drone the ability to map the distance to its destination and does not need to identify what exactly is in the environment. In this way, the drone can recognize objects in its field of vision and reduce the occurrence of collisions. Therefore, you can search for objects based on specific tasks.
All this is encompassed in two main concepts: Data Analysis and Navigation.
Being necessary that the data process the faster, more precise, and easier the image evaluation, the better the automatic navigation will be.
The first AI technology that we come across is Machine Learning. ML often uses statistical techniques to allow computers to learn from data. Even if they have not been programmed to do so.
One type of technique within ML is Artificial Neural Networks. ANNs mimic the operations of the human brain to analyze and respond to the received information. To do this, they use artificial neurons, which are activated according to a function that defines them, and are divided into several layers. These layers are divided into three groups: input, hidden, and output layers.
Current use Cases of Drones with AI
The Anduril company has launched a new “ silent ” autonomous drone for military and commercial use: the Ghost 4 sUAS. Or it offers more capacity for resistance, autonomy, and teamwork. The company’s founder, Palmer Luckey, simply describes it as “the best drone out there.” The drone can fly for more than 100 minutes with real mission payloads. And the design of it is like a helicopter’s skeleton, with a single rotor rather than a multicopter setup. Thus it achieves a lower disk load, greater resistance, and being more silent.
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