I used to work in perception for autonomous aerial vehicles and horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid. Traditional stereo won't help you localize them -- wires are thin so even mere detection can be hard, and one portion of a wire looks much like another so feature matching fails resulting in bad or no depth estimates -- and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption (which both have to be optimizied for drones). It's been years since I've worked in this field, and Amazon has many smart people thinking about it but I'm not surprised it's still a difficult problem.

▲ vpShane 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ah yeah I came up with the solution to that one. It's 'don't fly drones over our heads' approach. Also the 'upgrade the fragile infrastructure so a light breeze doesn't take out millions of people's power.'

	▲	venturecruelty 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry, not profitable enough, not a "team player". Please enjoy these weekly 1:1s with your manager and HR.

▲ cesarb an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Traditional stereo won't help you localize them [...] and LIDAR sacrifices resolution for weight and power consumption

I wonder if a more mechanical solution wouldn't help:

Whiskers, like on a cat. A long enough set of thin lightweight whiskers could touch the wire before the propellers do, giving time for the drone to stop and change course. Essentially, giving the drone a sense of touch.

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jrussino 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

As an undergrad I worked with a professor who was doing precisely that! https://sense-lab.github.io/pubs/pdf/solomon_nature_2006.pdf

I hadn't thought about this in a long time. Looks like her lab is still going strong doing research at the intersection of biology and robotics on whisker-based sensing:

https://sense-lab.github.io/robotics.html

https://sense-lab.github.io/publications.html

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ianferrel an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Thin lightweight whiskers are going to be challenging to manage on a propeller-driven vehicle. They'll get blown all over the place. Having them extend out past the propellers will likely get them tangled in the propellers.

	▲	ssl-3 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, they'll move around in the prop wash. But that's fine, isn't it? If they're intended to detect fixed objects, then noticing that one or more of them have ceased to be blown around in that way may be a good way to detect unanticipated contact with a fixed object: When the signal becomes less noisy, then maybe something is in the way. And the whiskers don't have to be all floppy like a wet noodle. I myself am thinking that something rigid or semi-rigid might be good. Perhaps something akin to armature wire, or thin spring steel. Maybe even literal bamboo chopsticks. They can also be constrained so that they don't get sent into the props. My little brain thinks that the drone-end of the whiskers can be attached to potentiometers, with light return springs to bring them back towards center, like the mechanism used by an analog stick on a PS3 controller.

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cromka an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Would help avoid damage with other misrecognized or ignired objects, too.

▲ parliament32 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> horizontal wires were the hardest common object to avoid... Traditional stereo won't help you localize them

This makes a lot of sense. I wonder if it wouldn't be better for autonomous vision to use three cameras instead of two for better spatial reasoning.. maybe in a triangle pattern?

	▲	riotnrrd 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		We experimented with a rig with more cameras on it (four, in a square) but the baseline of the cameras on the drones we were using could be measured in centimeters, so the vertical stereo pairs didn't provide much better results. Further, more cameras means more power, more weight, and much more expensive on-board processing (which also will require more power).
	▲	2 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

▲ wat10000 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s really hard for people too. The advice I got for landing in a field was to assume that every pole you saw had wires going to every other pole. Which is reasonable enough for that scenario, but not workable for continual low altitude flying in a built up area.

▲ bri3d 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Definitely tough. mmWave radar is useful for this use case; I know Amazon were testing it on earlier drones but I'm not sure if they still use it.

▲ londons_explore 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Cables don't move often. Why not simply have a map of all of them?

Google sell maps of things like this from street view data.

▲ HenrikB an hour ago | parent | next [-]

OpenStreetMap supports annotating poles and theirs cables. It's common for power lines (local and long distance). There are also annotations for communication lines (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:communication%3Dline).

There are also public and proprietary "aviation obstacle" databases across the world.

▲ octoberfranklin 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Any one particular cable might not move often, but if a telco owns N bucket trucks it's a safe bet that about N cables move every workday.

Telcos are notoriously secretive about the location of their fiber. They even got most state legislatures to exempt it from state-level FOIA laws.

▲ riotnrrd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All cables? Everywhere in the entire country? Accurate to the centimeter level and updated on the hour?

Edit: This was flippant, but the real issues are: any map you get will be incomplete and obsolete almost immediately and cables move and sway in the breeze.

▲ lazide 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It doesn’t need to be at the cm level. Giving them a 10m berth should be fine.

▲ anamexis 2 hours ago | parent [-]

A 10m berth from wires would exclude a substantial proportion of houses in my city.

▲ lazide 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Then they shouldn’t be flying in your city.

As is apparently becoming obvious.

▲ ejoso an hour ago | parent [-]

I can’t think of a major city I’ve been to on earth where 10M from a hung cable is realistic outside of some suburbs and rural areas.

	▲	throwaway2037 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		`> I can’t think of a major city I’ve been to on earth` Does Manhattan count? I am pretty sure south of 96th street has no above ground utilities.

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