Iain Guilliard, Richard Rogahn, Jim Piavis, Andrey Kolobov
Robotics: Science and Systems, 2018
Presented by Zachary Sunberg, August 25, 2021
Thermals can help aircraft fly with less power.
Video by Tobias Kemmerer
Birds use thermalling extensively
Thermals are difficult to detect.
Environment
Belief Updater
Policy/Planner
\(b\)
\(a\)
\[b_t(s) = P\left(s_t = s \mid a_1, o_1 \ldots a_{t-1}, o_{t-1}\right)\]
True State
\(s = 7\)
Observation \(o = -0.21\)
Assumptions:
No pitch because that would be "cheating"
\(R(s, a, s') = h_s - h_{s'}\)
\(R(b) = tr(cov(b))\)
4 second horizon
12 second horizon
Radian Pro (2m wingspan)
"Nearly constant cloud cover, frequent gusty winds and rain"
Typical flight time: 2000s = half an hour
"companion computers on larger sUAVs may be able to run a full-fledged POMDP solver in real time. Design and evaluation of a controller based on solving the thermalling POMDP near-optimally, e.g., using an approach similar to Slade et al. [36]’s, is a direction for future work."
[36] P. Slade, P. Culbertson, Z. Sunberg, and M. J. Kochen- derfer. Simultaneous active parameter estimation and control using sampling-based bayesian reinforcement learning. In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2017. URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.09055.