Our work on Designing Safe Autonomous Systems includes autonomous air traffic control for future drone urban air mobility networks of 1000-5000 drones over urban areas. One key issue is that - unlike commercial airlines, these drones do not fly along pre-set routes but follow what is called "free flight" and can choose their travel route. This introduces a critical problem of collisions between drones and needs to be handled via collision avoidance systems between the drones. We believe that this is a notoriously difficult problem among the many hot topics for research.
Kuk Jang, Yash Pant, Alena Rodionova and Prof. Rahul Mangharam wrote a paper on Learning-to-Fly RL which won the Best in Session Award at the Digital Avionics Systems Conference last week. To learn more, please check out their talk video.
Congratulations to Rahul and all!
