Engineless unmanned aerial vehicle propulsion by dynamic soaring

Dynamic soaring is a flight technique which extracts energy from wind gradients with the potential to power small unmanned aerial vehicles in maritime applications. Wind gradients of the required magnitude naturally occur at the air-sea interface due to friction between the waves and the moving air. Suitability of dynamic soaring as a means of propulsion requires clarification of the achievable flight performance and the likelihood of favorable winds. Optimal trajectories for minimal and maximal wind conditions are generated as well as trajectories for optimal cross-country travel. The flight model's differential flatness property is used to simplify the optimization problem. The likelihood of favorable winds is predicted based on long term weather statistics and knowledge of the minimal and maximal permissible wind strengths. Comparison of the likelihood of favorable winds for the wandering albatross and an unmanned aerial vehicle of similar size shows that the ability to fly close to the surface is a key factor governing dynamic soaring performance

New Millennium AI and the Convergence of History: Update of 2012

...millennium brought the first mathematically sound, asymptotically optimal, universal problem solvers, providing a new, rigorous foundation for the previously largely heuristic field of General AI and embedded agents. There also has been rapid progress in not quite universal but still rather general and practical artificial recurrent neural networks for learning sequence-processing programs, now yielding state-of-the-art results in real world applications. And the computing power per Euro is still growing by a factor of 100-1000 per decade, greatly increasing the feasibility of neural networks in general, which have started to yield human-competitive results in challenging pattern recognition competitions. Finally, a recent formal theory of fun and creativity identifies basic principles of curious and creative machines, laying foundations for artificial scientists and artists. Here I will briefly review some of the new results of my lab at IDSIA, and speculate about future developments, pointing out that the time intervals between the most notable events in over 40,000 years or 2 9 lifetimes of human history have sped up exponentially, apparently converging to zero within the next few decades. Or is this impression just a by-product of the way humans allocate memory space to past events