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A comment on High-Speed AI Drone Overtakes World-Champion Drone Racers. Parent comment

Re:High-Speed AI Drone Overtakes World-Champion Drone Racers by 05 on Thursday August 31, 2023 @07:23AM (#37335483)
Well, they've muddied the waters well enough. The b-roll in the last segment of the video you linked shows motion tracked drones and the 2022 event that used motion tracking (the balls used for motion tracking are visible on the drone arms). The voiceover tells us the system won against human racers. So, even if they have a vision only run made on the same track that beat human times, that run wasn't shown (but you couldn't tell that if you just watched that video).

And from BMSThomas' video, it's obvious their vision only system wasn't ready for prime time in 2022, but they were still working on it.

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Re:High-Speed AI Drone Overtakes World-Champion Drone Racers by nullc on Thursday August 31, 2023 @11:05AM (#37338314)
My read is they were only using the motion tracked system to train the residual network, but the actual competitive flights were done without input from the external tracking but they still captured the data, so they could feed it to their training for future runs.
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Re:High-Speed AI Drone Overtakes World-Champion Drone Racers by BotJunkie on Thursday August 31, 2023 @12:34PM (#37339876)
This paper is based on the performance at the 2022 event, but it took this long to write it up and get it published.

The tracking system was used during all of the races for data collection of both the autonomous and human-piloted drones, which is why the reflective markers are visible.

They did do some demonstrations of the drones controlled with the tracking cameras, and they were significantly faster, but the vision-based drones were definitely able to fly faster than the human pilots in some races.

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