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Learning an Urban Air Mobility Encounter Model from Expert Preferences (arxiv.org)
1 point by sel1 on Jul 16, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of needing large collections of real flights, this system learns to generate random city air-taxi encounters for testing collision-avoidance systems by asking an expert which of two simulated scenarios looks more realistic. It produced realistic trajectories after only a few minutes of expert time.

Abstract

Airspace models have played an important role in the development and evaluation of aircraft collision avoidance systems for both manned and unmanned aircraft. As Urban Air Mobility (UAM) systems are being developed, we need new encounter models that are representative of their operational environment. Developing such models is challenging due to the lack of data on UAM behavior in the airspace. While previous encounter models for other aircraft types rely on large datasets to produce realistic trajectories, this paper presents an approach to encounter modeling that instead relies on expert knowledge. In particular, recent advances in preference-based learning are extended to tune an encounter model from expert preferences. The model takes the form of a stochastic policy for a Markov decision process (MDP) in which the reward function is learned from pairwise queries of a domain expert. We evaluate the performance of two querying methods that seek to maximize the information obtained from each query. Ultimately, we demonstrate a method for generating realistic encounter trajectories with only a few minutes of an expert's time.

Sydney M. Katz, Anne-Claire Le Bihan, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
arXiv:1907.05575 · cs.AI · submitted Jul 12, 2019
abstract · pdf · 8 pages, 7 figures, submitted to 2019 Digital Avionics Systems Conference

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