Training a Neural Network to operate drones using Genetic Algorithm 

Good idea, and I like your smoke!

I love how they seem to move so organically even though it seems like a relatively simple model. I bet there's some really interesting optimisation problems and extra restrictions you could throw at this.

I think that the need to center themselves perfectly with the sphere is what makes them not become speed machines. Because when they reach the target they always gotta somehow "dock". And that requires their inertia to be 0 when they reach that point so they have to slow down. If somehow this was changed by making the drones to just need to touch the point at any part and maybe making the orb bigger I would certainly expect that there would be more speedy manoeuvres to just arrive at the target and pass through it. Perhaps even in an elliptical patrolling. Would be certainly interesting to see.

5:28, gen 900: Ok, you guys are too good and I'm tired now. Bye!!!

I'd love to see a game where your enemies are all neural network trained AI, and the higher the difficulty, the more trained AI variant you will have to face

Would be really interesting to add fuel consumption to the mix and watch them optimize their fuel economy

Very cool stuff, well done! Now make them go through an obstacle course 😁

This channel is a gem

Props to Gen 300 and 400 for beings underdogs and yet surviving for so long

This is one of the coolest projects I've ever seen. Would be awesome to extend to add walls and an environment! Great work.

love this channel. what separates this guy from others is his consistent ability to make his sims look cool.

Great work. I think many people would appreciate seeing background of the work.

The end of play lineup was a cute touch. Nice work!

This is one of the coolest implementations i've seen. Nj!

Dude I love it when they get sooo roofless! So fun to watch!

You are amazing. Thank you for sharing your fascinating work.

Impressive Stuff! Had my hands on GAs too for my Bachelor Thesis but with a 6 DOF 3D acting robotic arm. Kinda addicting when you dive deep down in ML :)!

OMG This is so cool, your video actually change my attitude toward neural network from hate to love.

Very nice! Please make more such content, with neural network and drones! :)

Thanks for the video! It's really inspiring.

I wrote my autopilot cargo drone for space engineers and still i am impressed by the work

That end result with the live-tracking is so good! I wonder how viable it is to train simple neural networks like this for game enemy AI

very nice! I'd love to see the same tests, but with added random disturbances like wind gusts from the side, to see how well they can adapt to that!

Very nice result!

xDDD the "ok..." almost kills me

I like these projects !

1:58 that faint Vader "noooooo" put me on the floor for some reason

Pls make more vids like this I love them

Totally amazing!!!

5:56 The drone in the left down corner synchronized with the beat in the music. Perfection.

That was really cool.

Love that video

So good! :o very impressive ✨✨✨

Getting some strong Factorio vibes at 4:57

That drone that got yeeted at 5:30 had me dieing 😂

It would be great to have a remake of this one

gen 400 is like that one kid in your class that cant stand still when waiting in a queue

Wonderful!

It's really nice 👍

Hello, very interesting work ! Did you think about testing scenarios with obstacles ? It would be also interesting to compare the last trajectories and controls with optimal control algorithms solutions. Cheers.

Amazing 😮😮😮

Which parameters give the drone positive or negative feedback? Is flying time a positive or a negative parameter? An acceleration to the target?

I'm kind of upset that you didn't publish the thing at the end on itch. Its so satisfying to see the drone follow your mouse and I want to play around with it. Great video!

Other than giving us almost 20 seconds to read 6 words at 4:39 this was very enjoyable to watch :p

7:24 Loved how the Gen-400's legs synced with the music... Btw, How do we decide the size of the hidden layers? Is there some rule or formula for the best size approximation?

Very cool

Amazing

400 was such a trooper

I like how it learned to turn off its thrusters to arrest upward motion and to speed up descent.

Achei muito interessante o seu canal, obrigado mano

This is cool.

I tryed the mouse controlled vesion what you uploaded on github. And i saw that it's easy to confuse the A.I. in that way to lose controll and fall off the map. I think if you crate a small Trainer A.I. for the target control what best interest to confuse the drone and make it fall off the map, it can train the drone to not fall off no matter how the target moves.

Wowwww I'm amazed

The target tracking would be cool for a background

Great video! How long have you been training them? Greetings from Uruguay!

somewhat smaller models and policy gradient following might have increased convergence speed. MLPs are differentiable, so you could just backpropagate through them, sampling distance to the target at every frame and accumulating rewards over the trajectory for an unbiased estimate of a policy’s optimality. you could even use a decay term to incentivize the robots to move faster by downweighting rewards acquired later in the trajectory: distance to the target is ideally the same in the end, but according to the gradient of this reward function, faster would be better. the only thing left would be running the simulations in parallel or faster than real-time by simply not fully rendering the state of the environment at every training step

You should make a game out of this, it looks very funny!!

good job :)

im more impressed by the smoke, great project though!

Adding a fuel allowance would probably add a more varied result, possibly get those burn hard drones quicker. Also maybe increase your destination bubble a fraction ? This increase the prize rate and hopefully the drones would tighten up the homecoming naturally like the ants do for food routes

i have no idea about how you did it ..but it seems like something fun to learn

You could turn the target tracking into a game, try to get the drone to lose control as quickly as possible, using your mouse as the target! Or, just play with it. It looks fun.

I suggest to add more then just time to the fitness equation. Fe. Energy use, pressicion, stability of flight and adding external forces like wind. with these factors the movement would become smooth like silk. But nice project anyway

Wow that's amazing and looks amazing, how did you cross the two neural networks?

oooh idea. Space Invaders: Drones Addition. Different levels use different generations of drones as enemies.

This would be a great premise for a game where the character tracks the mouse so instead of controlling the character you're directing it and it gets better as you play through AI learning

This video felt like it's 30 minutes because I somehow kept falling asleep every ten seconds or so. And it's not boring and no I am not high, idk I guess I just got tired or something

give a consolation prize to generation 300! It deserves it all Have you ever tried using a neural network on a hardware platform?

thats epic

it's cool to see your using dropout, so it learns better

7:25 the music moves to your left and right ear as the drone in the top right moves it's power to it's left and right thruster.

Wooow drone is very cool

Imagine spending hours and hours trying to get to something and then when you finally get there you just have to go to another one

Beginning of the video: LOL!! those squeaks as they fall are really funny End of the video: let's run to buy some food cans before they come for me!!!

I love this! I'm gonna implement it right now in Python. What genetic algorithm were you using? I'm planning on using Neat

"300! 400! you're embarrassing everyone!"

Nice work! What mutation/crossover did you use?

I would love for you to make an eco system like the bibites using those drones

Hi Pezzza, I really liked the video and the way you trained it. Can you tell me how can I learn to code to train a model like this ?? I really want to learn how to do this level of coding. pls reply

i want to see how chaotic it will be if the drones had collision

"Im a Hovercraft like my Father before me and his before him!"

Fantastic. Did you published it? Why did you choose GA for learning instead of traditional NN methods, e.g. stochastic gradient descent?

What about creating new variables? Like saving fuel or energy consumption, or giving priorities like speed over energy/fuel consumption

These drones are adorable

After a few tweaks, I have a feeling this could have real-world use.

Ok, now make these drones fight in groups of 5, they can kill other drones in 2 ways one is to ram into enemy drones (killing both of them instantaneously), or shooting them with miniguns (only killing the target if it is hit X amount of times). But every time when they die they respawn, smarter, faster, more accurate, etc.

Would be interesting to have a drone sumo where they can collide and try to shove each other out of a ring.

Really cool project!!! I was wondering what fitness function you used?

man this is so cool. a bit off topic but how are you rendering the thruster particles and smoke?

great Awesome!!👌👌😀. where did you learn to do this?

Micheal Reeves breaking out in a cold sweat in the corner

It would be interesting to see which learning algorithm would produce better results, this genetic algorithm or back propagation or something similar.

1:05: this one looks like Los Angeles Battle drones

nice

Gen 400 is an all time favourite haha

that's so fantastic, wow :

this shit is nuts

And you did it with two hidden layers, nice! Also, you have to give it a gun now I mean come on. Let's see the the level 5500 drones beat a human being.

you should make a game where you control a small ship like asteroids and your goal is to juke out the drones and cause them to crash or see how long you can survive before they hit you or something

the target tracking drone would be a really cool and distracting extension, it follows your cursor around where ever you put it lol