TITLE: Goal-directed Learning to Fly

PRESENTER: Andrew Isaac

AFFILIATION: CSE, UNSW

DATE: Friday 8th August 2003

TIME: 12:00pm to 1:00pm

PLACE: CSE K17 1st Floor Seminar Room

ABSTRACT:

Learning to fly an aircraft is a complex task that requires the development of control skills and goal achievement strategies. This talk presents a behavioural cloning system that learns to successfully fly manoeuvres, in turbulence, of a realistic aircraft simulation. A hierarchical decomposition of the problem is employed where goal settings and the control skill to achieve them are learnt. The benefit of this goal-directed approach is demonstrated in the reuse of the learnt manoeuvres to a flight path that includes novel manoeuvres. The system is based on an error minimisation technique that benefits from the use of model tree learners. The model trees provide a compact and comprehensible representation of the underlying control skill and goal structure. The performance of the system was improved by compensating for human reaction times and goal anticipation. We conclude that our system addresses current limitations of behavioural cloning by producing robust, reusable and readable clones.

BIOGRAPHY OF SPEAKER:

Andrew Isaac is a doctoral candidate in Artificial Intelligence at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales. This talk is based on a paper with the same title coauthored with Claude Sammut. The paper will be presented at the ICML 2003 conference in Washington DC later in August.

Seminar Convenor:

Bernhard Hengst
Tel: +61-2-9385-3988,
E-mail: bernhardh@cse.unsw.edu.au
School of Computer Science & Engineering, UNSW.