Really Deep Learning | BOSS Magazine

1. That’s as a result of the Australian AI and deep studying innovator is a catalyst for the autonomy revolution. Superior Navigation’s options and robotics are in all places you’ll be able to think about, from 10,000 toes below the oceans to deep house. Nearer to dwelling, Superior Navigation has a hand in applied sciences which might be writing the long run, resembling drone supply, driverless automobiles, and aerial taxis.

Funding Innovation

In November, Superior Navigation and main international funding agency KKR introduced a $68 million Collection B funding spherical with buyers resembling former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and bringing on the likes of deep studying enterprise agency AI Capital.

“The technology we’ve developed, and are developing, excites a lot of people,” CEO and co-founder Xavier Orr instructed BOSS. “That autonomy revolution that is core to the company’s mission is something a lot of people want to get more involved with. We’re seeing a lot of high-profile individuals share their confidence in our vision. It’s been great to have such backing.”

Orr couldn’t go into specifics on precisely what new applied sciences the cash would go towards, however amongst what’s public is LiDAV (mild detection altimetry and velocimetry), which Orr described as like “a new version of LiDAR. It has exciting applications for driverless cars and air taxis, he said, but most interestingly it’s being used on NASA’s Artemis moon mission for commercial lunar payload services. LiDAV can use lasers to detect a vehicle’s velocity and relation to the lunar surface in 3D. This will help with autonomous landing on the moon and with exploration of the moon’s surface.

Wherever conditions make it difficult or impossible to see, LiDAV guides the way with extreme accuracy and precision.

Performance Under Pressure

Advanced Navigation’s solutions have a broad array of applications, from driverless boats and surveying on the ocean’s surface, to autonomous agriculture and surveying on land, to quadrotor surveying, drones, and blimps in the air, not to mention defense capabilities across the board. It’s in the deep ocean and in deep space where the most impressive feats can take place.

The company’s Hydrus underwater drones operate as far as 10,000 feet below the surface, performing hydrography, undersea survey, ROV and AUV control and navigation, reef and habitat monitoring, research, and inspection of critical infrastructure.

“Deep sea is probably the most challenging of all,” Orr mentioned. “You have 300 times the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere. You have a saltwater environment that’s very corrosive. You have fouling that attaches to your vehicles. Radio waves don’t work underwater. In terms of communication there’s not a lot of options.”

Due to these engineering challenges, Hydrus took years to develop, however Superior Navigation labored out the sonar and inertial applied sciences essential to make it work. Comparatively, the excessive vibration, radiation, and vacuum of house are a breeze. Orr did admit that the dynamics of the Crimson Bull air races which demand pinpoint accuracy below forces of as much as 10 Gs may be as difficult because the deep sea.

AI & Neural Networks

Superior Navigation has its roots in Orr’s days at college, when he wrote a thesis on the appliance of neural networks to inertial navigation. On the time, navigation programs had been utilizing the Kalman filter, an algorithm from the Nineteen Sixties that makes an attempt to linearize non-linear issues. He found that neural networks did the identical and yielded a lot better outcomes. In 2012, he and Chris Shaw co-founded the corporate to commercialize this know-how, utilizing picture recognition to establish and observe objects in actual time, a keystone of the autonomous revolution.

Within the subsequent few years, Superior Navigation will maintain pushing the envelope of what’s doable in autonomy. All through these developments, sustainability can be on the forefront for Superior Navigation, which is carbon-neutral and ISO 14001-certified.

“We have some really exciting deep technologies in development,” Orr mentioned. “We’ve also got a number of acquisitions in the pipeline at the moment.

“Looking forward, where we see the most excitement occurring from here is things like drone deliveries, driverless cars, and aerial taxis. I think these are three autonomous system applications that are going to change the way we live.”

If they’ll get drones to behave 10,000 toes underwater, we’ll really feel fairly comfy taking a trip.