IAV Team Ready for the Finale

Deep Drone Challenge accepted!

12.01.2021  — 

A team revolving around IAV experts Karthik Desai and Pascal Behr provides proof of its machine learning know-how while participating in the brigkAIR / Airbus Deep Drone Challenge.

What’s it all about? Airplanes have to communicate with flight controllers via ATC (Air Traffic Control) – not a problem for piloted machines. But what if drones were also to succeed at understanding human commands, reacting to them, and responding just as intelligibly? An exciting question for a scenario in which Urban Air Taxis join air traffic in the future.

The challenge: ATC commands are analog and therefore always incredibly noisy. They don’t correspond to the traditional language used to train normal systems. That makes speech recognition complicated.

For this challenge, we’re bringing together five IAV experts from different disciplines, speech recognition and automation of unmanned systems, in order to achieve something exciting and new. It’s tremendous fun and we’re learning a lot.

Karthik Desai — in charge of Software Development of Unmanned Systems and “IAV Drone Whisperer” team member

The finale will be postponed due to Covid-19. There was a virtual peer review with the jury in November.

We can really build on our experience in the automotive field and were able to build a really good system in no time. We think we have a good chance of placing high. In November, we were the only team with a “real” video of our solution.

Pascal Behr — Team Lead Voice Control & Virtual Assistants and “IAV Drone Whisperer” Team Lead

Creative solutions and fresh inspiration are sometimes found outside of daily business. At IAV, we encourage our employees to discover new things by, for example, working on their own product ideas, funded projects, or individual initiatives like the Deep Drone Challenge.

We’ll keep our fingers crossed for Team “IAV Drone Whisperer” for the finale!

Read more about the challenge: https://brigkair.digital/ddc/