Helicopter Prodigy! Machine Teaches Itself to Fly!

This is pretty neat, here, kiddies.

Toy helicopters are pretty fun, right? Of course. Still, they are one of the more difficult things to maneuver because they require constant input from the pilot to keep it steady. Well, I was over at LiveScience and found an article about some dudes over at Stanford (Andrew Ng, a Stanford University professor directing the research of graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter and Morgan Quigley) are creating software that allows a helicopter to learn difficult maneuvers that only a pilot can do by watching other helicopters perform them.

Thats right, these helicopters have real human eyes!

No no... of course they don't have eyes. They just record the actions of pilots, and can reproduce those actions on their own. It is the first step to creating machines that can go places too dangerous for humans to go. Neat!

Here's a video of the helicopter doing sweet tricks:


And here's a link to a video where they explain what the project is about:

Learning Helicopter.

Sorry, I can't embed that one. Its "protected".

Take to the skies, SuperForesters!