Schlagwort: Wolfram Language

  • Astronaut-made virtual co-pilot

    Astronaut-made virtual co-pilot

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    This project features several of our favourite things. Astronauts! Machine learning! High-altitude danger! Graphs! (It could only get slightly better with the addition of tap-dancing centaurs.) Read on to have your nerdliest pleasure centres tickled.

    Solar Pilot Guard - wing of a plane in flight

    Your interest should be focussed on the strange fin with the red tip. Although we agree the mountains look nice too.

    Solar Pilot Guard, a Foale family project

    Michael Foale is a former astronaut with dual British/American citizenship; and thanks to that dual citizenship was revered by British kids like me as some kind of Superman when he spent time on the Russian Mir space station back in the 1990s. It’s always great to see one of our heroes using the Raspberry Pi, but it’s doubly great when the use it’s being put to is so very, very cool.

    Foale’s daughter Jenna is a PhD candidate in computational fluid dynamics, and together they have engineered a machine-learning system called Solar Pilot Guard to help prevent aircraft crashes, using the Wolfram Language on a Raspberry Pi. A solar-powered probe (that fin in the image above) detects changes in acceleration and air pressure to spot potential loss-of-control (LOC) events in flight, calculating the probability of each pressure/acceleration event representing a possible LOC event.

    Solar Pilot Guard schematic cross-section

    Click to embiggen

    If it detects a possible LOC event, the system issues a voice command to the pilot over Bluetooth speakers, using machine learning to tell the pilot what corrective measures they should take.

    Here it is in action:

    Solar Pilot Guard use in-flight

    An example of in-flight operation of the Solar Pilot Guard (SPG), issuing commands for correction of flight behavior that could lead to loss of control (LOC). Demonstrated commands: Push, Power – Left, Left – Right, Right Submitted to EAA AirVenture, Oshkosh 2017.

    Losing control to generate training data

    In order to train the network, Michael Foale had to feed the machine data about what LOCs and normal flight look like — which meant flying the kit in ways which would make the plane lose control, not just once, but over and over, until the neural net had the data it needed to differentiate different sorts of LOC events. Told you he was a superhero.

    A stack of different machine learning functions at different levels of abstraction are working together here. This is a training set from one of the (presumably terrifying) training flights:

    Solar Pilot Guard training set

    The Pi processes and learns from this data; if you’re interested in a very deep dive into the way this all works, and how you can build your own neural networks using the Wolfram Language, there’s a very comprehensive treatment over at the Wolfram blog.

    We love seeing projects like this that recognise just how robust and powerful a little Raspberry Pi can be. Jenna and Michael: thank you for sharing what you’ve been working on here. It’s one of the coolest and most audacious projects we’ve seen in a long time.

    Website: LINK

  • MagPi 72: AI made easy for your Raspberry Pi

    MagPi 72: AI made easy for your Raspberry Pi

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Hi folks, Rob from The MagPi here! With AI currently a hot topic in hobby tech, we thought we’d demystify it for you and your Raspberry Pi in The MagPi 72, out now!

    AI made easy, in issue 72 of The MagPi!

    The MagPi 72

    AI made easy covers several types of current AI and machine learning tech that you, as a hobbyist and consumer, can get your hands on and use with your Pi. Many companies offer voice and image recognition services that work with the help of machine learning, and it’s actually pretty easy to get started with these.

    We asked several AI experts to help us out with this, and we cover robot automation, getting the details of an image, and offline voice recognition. We promise it’s Skynet-safe.

    Make sweet music

    Want to make music? Then follow our guide to create your own Raspberry Pi–powered recording studio — all you need to bring to the table is your own musical talent.

    We’ve also got some great tutorials on how to make a mini magic mirror and hack Minecraft Pi with Mathematica, along with some fantastic project showcases such as the squirrel cafe and a ghost detector.

    Still not satisfied? Then check out our reviews and community segments — there’s a lot of excellent stuff to read about this issue.

    Get The MagPi 72

    You can get The MagPi 72 today from WHSmith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Asda. If you live in the US, head over to your local Barnes & Noble or Micro Center in the next few days for a print copy. You can also get the new issue online from our store, or digitally via our Android or iOS apps. And don’t forget, there’s always the free PDF as well.

    Rolling subscription offer!

    Want to support the Raspberry Pi Foundation and the magazine? You can now take out a monthly £5 subscription to the magazine, effectively creating a rolling pre-order system that saves you money on each issue.

    The MagPi subscription offer — The Magpi 72 - AI Raspberry Pi

    You can also take out a twelve-month print subscription and get a Pi Zero W plus case and adapter cables absolutely free! This offer does not currently have an end date.

    See you next month!

    Website: LINK