November Meeting:  Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley (directions:   https://sv.cmu.edu/who_we_are/visitor)

Learning for Autonomous Helicopter Control

Adam Coates, Stanford University   

While helicopters present numerous challenges for control design, human RC pilots are nonetheless capable of performing extreme aerobatics by learning from experience and from other pilots. We present learning algorithms that similarly learn from demonstrations of expert pilots and their own flight experience. These algorithms have been implemented on the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter, which is now capable of flying aerobatics at the level of an expert human pilot---well beyond the performance of any other autonomous helicopter.

Adam Coates:

Adam Coates is a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford University, working with Professor Andrew Ng.  His research focuses on robotics, machine learning and control.  He received his MS and BS from Stanford University in 2006, and is also an instrument-rated private pilot.