Data Science for Science

Courtesy: UNDP Moldova Civilian drones today are flown under very specific and safe weather and wind conditions. This is because these drones have adaptive control algorithms that are lacking. This applies to remote-controlled drones as well as autonomous ones. The direct and specific effect of various wind conditions on aircraft dynamics, performance, and stability cannot be accurately characterised as a simple mathematical model. Engineers at Caltech have developed Neural-Fly, a deep-learning method that can help drones cope with new and unknown wind conditions in real time. Existing Machine Learning methods require a huge amount of data to train the model and adapting these large models in real-time is all but impossible. To overcome this, Neural-Fly was developed with a "separation strategy". Only a few parameters of the neural network must be updated in real time and this is achieved with a new meta-learning algorithm, which pre-trains the neural network so that only the