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How MIT's VR environment is saving drones from crashing to death
Sales of drones are clocking in around $200 million and doubling each year. Which means there's a lot of testing to be done.

Drones, or unmanned vehicles that fly through the air, are used by civilians and the military alike. While the military uses drones to get to areas that are too difficult or risky for humans, commercially drones are used for photography, research, and even racing.
According to Gartner, a research firm, drone sales grew 60% from 2016 to 2017 to $2.2 million, with revenue up 36% to almost $4.5 billion. With estimates of U.S. drone sales doubling year over year, millions of hobbyist drones are now in homes. Per year, sales of drones are clocking in around $200 million, and an average drone from DJI, the leading commercial drone manufacturer, is between $500 to $1,000.
Drones are essential to many fields, such as businesses, the government, and certain industries, like agriculture. Important fields with promising drone-usage include:
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Photographing
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Journalism
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Film
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Express delivery (think Amazon)
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Supplying necessities in disaster zones
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Search and Rescue (thermal sensor drones)
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Mapping of inaccessible terrains
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Safety inspections
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Crops (monitoring, delivery of resources, etc)
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Cargo transport
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Law enforcement, like border patrol
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Strom tracking
With so much money being spent on the development of drones, testing their safety, abilities, and durability are paramount to the industry’s success. After all, with a $500+ price tag, replacing them isn’t cheap. Due to the cost of repairing and replacing drones, a better way to train autonomous drones was needed. That’s where MIT comes in - with a VR training system named “Flight Goggles.”
The VR environment creates indoor obstacles for the drones to fly around, without actually needing to have those obstacles be indoors - the testing facility can remain empty, while the drone sees “real” obstacles. Additional benefits of “Flight Goggles” are endless, as virtual testing facilities in which any environment or condition can be subbed in for the drones to train.
“We think this is a game-changer in the development of drone technology, for drones that go fast,” Associate Professor Sertac Karaman said in an MIT blog post. “If anything, the system can make autonomous vehicles more responsive, faster, and more efficient.”
Currently, if a researcher wants to fly an autonomous drone, they must set up in a large testing facility in which physical obstacles, like doors and windows, must be brought in, as well as large nets to catch falling drones. When they do crash (and they do) the cost of the project and the development timeline both increase, due to repairs and replacements.
“The moment you want to do high-throughput computing and go fast, even the slightest changes you make to its environment will cause the drone to crash,” said Karaman. “You can’t learn in that environment. If you want to push boundaries on how fast you can go and compute, you need some sort of virtual-reality environment.”
Researchers use a motion capture system, electronics, and an image rendering program to transmit the images to the drone. The images - which are processed by the drone at about 90 frames per second - are all thanks to circuit boards and the VR program the drone operates within.
“The drone will be flying in an empty room, but will be ‘hallucinating’ a completely different environment, and will learn in that environment,” Karaman explains.
During the course of 10 test flights using the VR program, the drone (which files at around 5 miles per hour) successfully flew through a virtual window 361 times, only crashing three times - which doesn’t impact the development of costs. And as the window was virtual, nobody was hurt by glass. So it's a win-win for enthusiasts, researchers, professionals, and everyone in between.

3,000-pound Triceratops skull unearthed in South Dakota
"You dream about these kinds of moments when you're a kid," said lead paleontologist David Schmidt.
Excavation of a triceratops skull in South Dakota.
- The triceratops skull was first discovered in 2019, but was excavated over the summer of 2020.
- It was discovered in the South Dakota Badlands, an area where the Triceratops roamed some 66 million years ago.
- Studying dinosaurs helps scientists better understand the evolution of all life on Earth.
Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p style="margin-left: 20px;">"We had to be really careful," Schmidt told St. Louis Public Radio. "We couldn't disturb anything at all, because at that point, it was under law enforcement investigation. They were telling us, 'Don't even make footprints,' and I was thinking, 'How are we supposed to do that?'"</p><p>Another difficulty was the mammoth size of the skull: about 7 feet long and more than 3,000 pounds. (For context, the largest triceratops skull ever unearthed was about <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2010.483632" target="_blank">8.2 feet long</a>.) The skull of Schmidt's dinosaur was likely a <em>Triceratops prorsus, </em>one of two species of triceratops that roamed what's now North America about 66 million years ago.</p>Credit: David Schmidt / Westminster College
<p>The triceratops was an herbivore, but it was also a favorite meal of the T<em>yrannosaurus rex</em>. That probably explains why the Dakotas contain many scattered triceratops bone fragments, and, less commonly, complete bones and skulls. In summer 2019, for example, a separate team on a dig in North Dakota made <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">headlines</a> after unearthing a complete triceratops skull that measured five feet in length.</p><p>Michael Kjelland, a biology professor who participated in that excavation, said digging up the dinosaur was like completing a "multi-piece, 3-D jigsaw puzzle" that required "engineering that rivaled SpaceX," he jokingly told the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/science/triceratops-skull-65-million-years-old.html" target="_blank">New York Times</a>.</p>Morrison Formation in Colorado
James St. John via Flickr
Triceratops illustration
Credit: Nobu Tamura/Wikimedia Commons |
The cost of world peace? It's much less than the price of war
The world's 10 most affected countries are spending up to 59% of their GDP on the effects of violence.
- Conflict and violence cost the world more than $14 trillion a year.
- That's the equivalent of $5 a day for every person on the planet.
- Research shows that peace brings prosperity, lower inflation and more jobs.
- Just a 2% reduction in conflict would free up as much money as the global aid budget.
- Report urges governments to improve peacefulness, especially amid COVID-19.
The evolution of modern rainforests began with the dinosaur-killing asteroid
The lush biodiversity of South America's rainforests is rooted in one of the most cataclysmic events that ever struck Earth.
Velociraptor Dinosaur in the Rainforest
- One especially mysterious thing about the asteroid impact, which killed the dinosaurs, is how it transformed Earth's tropical rainforests.
- A recent study analyzed ancient fossils collected in modern-day Colombia to determine how tropical rainforests changed after the bolide impact.
- The results highlight how nature is able to recover from cataclysmic events, though it may take millions of years.
New study determines how many mothers have lost a child by country
Global inequality takes many forms, including who has lost the most children
