Tagged unmanned aerial vehicles

An MIT researcher built a small Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV, or drone) that can fly itself while avoiding obstacles in its path. Andrew Barry, a PhD student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), says, “Everyone is building drones these days, but nobody knows how to get them to stop running into things.” Popular recreational drones can’t fly themselves because the required equipment, such as Lidar sensors, are too big to fit on their small frames. To get around this, Barry came up with an efficient algorithm that saves time and space by processing only the necessary information.