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Ex-Tesla Engineer Builds Autonomous AI Drone
Former Tesla Autopilot engineer Yacine demonstrated his self-built autonomous drone stack, stress-testing a sim-to-real training pipeline that trained a policy in just two minutes.
2026-09-27 ~ 2026-09-28 · 3 episodes · 8 posts
Episode 1 · Ex-Tesla Engineer Shows Plug-and-Play Drone Autonomy Kit (2026-09-27, 2 posts)
Former Tesla Autopilot engineer yacineMTB demonstrated a self-built drone autonomy kit with fully onboard, local computing and sensors that works with any drone. The prototype currently flies only 3 minutes, but the autonomy module is what he plans to ship.
- Ex-Tesla engineer claims plug-and-play drone autonomy kit with fully local compute and sensors — yacineMTB · 2026-09-27
- Yacine says his autonomous flying kit prototype works on any drone — yacineMTB · 2026-09-27
Episode 2 · DIY AI Drone Tackles Backflips as Hardest-Case Stress Test (2026-09-27, 3 posts)
Developer Yacine is stress-testing his AI training pipeline on a homemade micro drone built as a hardest-case platform, with heavy thrust losses and near-limit weight. He plans a takeoff demo within three minutes, backflip maneuvers, and self-made lithium-ion batteries to replace standard LiPo packs.
- Dev building AI drone with custom lion batteries, says compute module works on any drone — yacineMTB · 2026-09-27
- Why this AI drone is built as a 'hardest case': backflips to stress-test the training pipeline — yacineMTB · 2026-09-27
- yacineMTB Stress-Tests His AI Training Pipeline With Real Drone Backflips — yacineMTB · 2026-09-27
Episode 3 · Ex-Tesla Engineer Proves General Sim2Real with Drone (2026-09-28, 3 posts)
Former X/Tesla engineer Yacine demonstrated a general sim2real pipeline, training a robot policy in just two minutes and planning drone experiments to prove its generality, with hardware costs limited to a single RTX 4090.
- Yacine demos general sim2real pipeline: policy trained in just two minutes — yacineMTB · 2026-09-28
- Drone as proof: same infrastructure can do sim2real in the general case — yacineMTB · 2026-09-28
- Yacine: one RTX 4090 is enough for my drone sim2real infrastructure bet — yacineMTB · 2026-09-28