If you’ve stood in line for Disneyland’s “Star Tours” ride before, the below picture might look a little familiar. But this isn’t an animatronic for a new Star Wars attraction. Instead, it’s an actual robot pilot—one that can reportedly learn how to fly a plane simply by reading the manual.
Engineers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) announced this month that they’d successfully built a humanoid robot for aviation. Called PIBOT, the robot sits in the cockpit like a human pilot and uses its “hands” to physically move the necessary flight instruments. A set of external cameras allows PIBOT to keep an eye on its surroundings, while high-precision dexterity prevents turbulence and other forms of vibration from wrenching away control.
PIBOT learns to fly by reading flight manuals written in natural language. While KAIST has yet to share details on PIBOT’s natural language processing capabilities, the 5-foot, 143-pound robot is said to possess so much memory that it can learn and maintain knowledge of all Jeppesen navigation charts worldwide—a feat no human pilot has been able to accomplish. PIBOT also uses ChatGPT to consult an aircraft’s Quick Reference Handbook (QRF) and respond to emergency scenarios, allegedly at a rate faster than your typical human pilot.
Modern airplanes already feature autopilot software that takes care of certain flight tasks. But these aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution to growing desires for automation; software must be tailored to individual plane models. In contrast, PIBOT can learn how to fly virtually any plane without modifying the aircraft. It can also take physical control where a piece of software can’t—though if you’re worried about out-of-control robots, this might be of little comfort.
So far, PIBOT has proven capable of starting KLA-100 (a Korean light aircraft), taxiing, taking off, cruising, cycling, and landing. These tasks have been conducted in a hyper-realistic flight control simulator, which physically and virtually mimics the real KLA-100. The PIBOT project won’t be finished until 2026, so there’s a chance the robot could soar among the clouds within the next few years. At that point, the engineers hope to commercialize PIBOT for military and civil use. Chief of Research Professor David Hyunchul Shim said that his team expects PIBOT “to be applied into various other vehicles like cars and military trucks….They will particularly be helpful in situations where military resources are severely depleted.” What was that about government-run flying robots, again?
