The paper also don’t claim this as the contribution so this article is just… misinformation? I think there’s a word for this, willfully being flabbergasted by basically anything so you can write an article about it.
Maybe what you mean is that it’s not surprising, because it was inevitable. That I would completely agree with. But it’s simply not true to say that robots have always been faster than humans. There was a first automated quadcopter that beat skilled humans, and it happened recently, because quadcopters are a recent development, and automated quadcopters are even more recent.
I'm honestly very surprised that this is the first time it's happened. I would have thought it would have been done years ago. But probably there's not been enough interest to actually do it.
For anyone who finds it as worthless as I do, the original press release the article mangles is at [0] and the DOI of the paper is 10.1126/scirobotics.abh1221.
As for the work, it's one thing to say "Of course a robot is faster in a known map with perfect state information.", it's another thing to actually _build_ a working system.
Research is an incremental process and this seems to be like a meaningful step.
[0]: https://www.media.uzh.ch/en/Press-Releases/2021/Drone-Race.h...
Just because you have all the information doesn't mean you can solve a constraint system before the heat death of the universe. Otherwise, NP hard problems like traveling salesman wouldn't be so scary.
A legit drone racing pilot is incredible at this also so it is not like there is a ton of meat on the bone to pick at.
It is cool from the perspective of racing drones even if less impressive from the perspective of AGI or something.
The rotation rate in the roll or pitch axis is around 1080 degrees per second - 3 complete revolutions per second. Many freestyle pilots fly higher rates than me.
I can, and do, go from 80mph in one direction, flip 180degrees to accelerate back to 80mph in the direction i just came - a 160mph change of speed in around 5-6 seconds approx.
The only axis i cant turn very fast in is yaw (quads have poor yaw authority compared to other axes) but even then it’s fast enough most people would consider it instant.
Huhwut?
That would be news to an entire field of engineering, thanks. Please apply for your PhD.
Excluding the fact that whole classes of problems are NP-complete and difficult to compute, there are classes of problems like "How do I fit this odd shape through this odd obstruction?" that don't even lend themselves to being computed well.
Off-topic, but is there an a word in English for this?
Given the website URL, I’m not the least bit surprised this is over hyped.