'PIBOT' Humanoid Robot Can Fly a Plane from Takeoff to Landing

Researchers at KAIST in South Korea are testing a humanoid robot called PIBOT (pilot robot) that is designed to operate a regular aircraft by sitting in the pilot's seat and using the controls just like a human would. PIBOT demonstrated its skills on a flight simulator at the 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2016) in Daejeon, South Korea. The robot can turn the engine on, taxi, take off, fly, and land. It relies on input from the simulator to determine the location and state of the aircraft and lands successfully 80 percent of the time.

Transcript

00:00:00 we have a robot that you can put in the airplane without any modification and then you'll be able to fly the airplane just like a human Pilots [Music] too my original motivation was to send the pilot robot Into the Danger Zone suppose there's a nuclear accident you need to catch fire Wildfire where the airplane can be damaged really every

00:00:27 time we train a new pilot it cost a lot of money and there's a lot of the risk factors and also any experience that one pilot has cannot be easily transferred to the next pilot but this is robot you can create a lot a lot of them once you have a one program you can simply copy and paste other robots so when they make a UAV they design their plane front ground up well

00:00:55 if you need a special airplane then you need to do that but um for if you want some casual aand application why don't you use the existing airplane by simply throwing in one robot that ex like a human pilot this robots work it it touches every aspect of Robotics even we start with the the manipulation recognition planning and how to teach the intelligence there are a lot of

00:01:22 problems but the what you're doing is we are barely scratching the surface right now and that we are identifying the research topics and then we are trying to do something we do best we like to show the world that it may be possible [Music]