This Flying Drone’s New AI Could Lead to Self-Driving Cars
There’s probably no more exciting piece of aerial technology than drones. Not only can they fly into hazardous environments to do things like fight wildfires, but they’re also great platforms to test other emerging technologies like 3D infrastructure printing and even brain-computer interfaces.
Engineers have even developed drones that can fly and navigate environments all by themselves—no human operator required. While they’ve been used for a variety of different applications like watering and seeding crops on farms, and mapping land and waterways, they’ve been fairly limited so far because of a big issue: they can’t really handle new environments. That means a self-flying drone needs to train on specific areas and terrain before it can navigate it by themselves.
That’s why MIT researchers published a study in the journal Science Robotics on Wednesday showcasing a new type of autonomous drone that utilizes an advanced neural network to fly. The authors say that the new design allows the drone to make better decisions when flying through completely new environments—and could have future applications in self-driving cars, search and rescue operations, wildlife monitoring, or even diagnosing medical issues.
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