Demo of MIT's Self-Flying UAV

UAVs are great, but most of them are also dumb as a sack of batteries and plastic. So dumb, in fact, that they have a whole chapter of YouTube devoted to their crashes. But a PhD student at MIT thinks he’s figured out a way to give them brains–or the next best thing.

As Andrew Barry, a PhD candidate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, puts it: it’s not hard to build a drone these days. The hard part is “how to get them to stop running into things.” Barry’s alternative is an algorithm that uses some clever and efficient programming to make a drone fully autonomous. In a new high-speed demo video, we get to see a high-speed demo of the technology involving some very dramatic chases through a sun-lit forest.