Overview
What this challenge is about.
You receive a PyBullet-based wind-turbine inspection simulator with parameterizable wind, blade orientation, and sensor noise. Design a 3-stage curriculum: (1) hover near a static blade, (2) hover under wind, (3) full inspection pattern with wind + sensor noise. Train PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization) progressively, with documented stage-transition criteria. Evaluate on a held-out test environment with unseen wind and blade orientations: success rate per stage, average inspection coverage, and crash rate. Success is a no-curriculum baseline beaten by at least 25 percent on full-task success rate with crash rate at or below 5 percent on the held-out test set.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Train a PPO agent with a 3-stage curriculum for drone wind-turbine inspection in simulation and quantify the curriculum's benefit.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Implement PPO with clipped objective from scratch or via a vetted reference
- Design and justify a curriculum of progressively harder training environments
- Evaluate RL transfer behavior on held-out simulator conditions
- Write a research roadmap that acknowledges sim-to-real risk
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
Careers
Roles this prepares you for.
Real titles. Real skill bridges. Pick the one closest to your trajectory.
ML Researcher
Designing curriculum experiments with proper baselines and held-out evaluation is the kind of research-craft that opens doors at robotics research teams.
This challenge sharpens
- ppo
- curriculum-learning
- deep-rl
Research Scientist
Multi-stage training methodology and sim-to-real humility are exactly the rigor signals research-scientist hiring expects.
This challenge sharpens
- curriculum-learning
- deep-rl
- robotics-evaluation
Applied AI Scientist
Translating simulator results into a real-flight roadmap memo is core applied-AI work at robotics startups.
This challenge sharpens
- simulation
- ppo
- robotics-evaluation