Drones do seem to take centre stage these days, and there is a very good reason for that – technology has advanced to such a point where drones play a far more important role in our lives than ever before, ranging from the mundane like delivery services to that of warfare – although dropping a warhead can be deemed to be a delivery of sorts too, right? A researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab,
PhD student Andrew Barry, managed to come up with a drone which is smart enough to autonomously avoid obstacles when it flies through the air at 30 miles an hour.
It does not do this through a self-aware artificial intelligence, but rather, the drone will fall back on a new obstacle-detection system which has been developed by Barry, since that is part of his thesis with MIT professor Russ Tedrake.
Barry shared, “Everyone is building drones these days, but nobody knows how to get them to stop running into things. If we want drones that can fly quickly and navigate in the real world, we need better, faster algorithms.” You know what they say, if you want something done, you’ve got to do it yourself, and so that is what Barry went ahead to do.
This stereo-vision algorithm is said to be 20 times faster compared to current software, letting the drone detect objects while building a full map of its surroundings in real time, and it operates at 120 frames per second, while boasting of depth information processing at a speed of 8.3 milliseconds per frame.
Filed in . Read more about Drones. Source: asia.pcmag