[ExI] Smart Quadcopters Find their Way without Human Help or GPS

[BillK]

Milestone series of tests have quadcopters slaloming through
woodlands, swerving around obstacles in a hangar, and reporting back
to their starting point all by themselves
outreach at darpa.mil   6/28/2017

<http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-06-28>

Quotes:

Phase 1 of DARPA’s Fast Lightweight Autonomy (FLA) program concluded
recently following a series of obstacle-course flight tests in central
Florida. Over four days, three teams of DARPA-supported researchers
huddled under shade tents in the sweltering Florida sun, fine-tuning
their sensor-laden quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) during
the intervals between increasingly difficult runs.

DARPA’s FLA program is advancing technology to enable small unmanned
quadcopters to fly autonomously through cluttered buildings and
obstacle-strewn environments at fast speeds (up to 20 meters per
second, or 45 mph) using onboard cameras and sensors as “eyes” and
smart algorithms to self-navigate. Potential applications for the
technology include safely and quickly scanning for threats inside a
building before military teams enter, searching for a downed pilot in
a heavily forested area or jungle in hostile territory where overhead
imagery can’t see through the tree canopy, or locating survivors
following earthquakes or other disasters when entering a damaged
structure could be unsafe.

"I was impressed with the capabilities the teams achieved in Phase 1,”
Ledé said. “We’re looking forward to Phase 2 to further refine and
build on the valuable lessons we’ve learned. We’ve still got quite a
bit of work to do to enable full autonomy for the wide-ranging
scenarios we tested, but I think the algorithms we’re developing could
soon be used to augment existing GPS-dependent UAVs for some
applications. For example, existing UAVs could use GPS until the air
vehicle enters a building, and then FLA algorithms would take over
while indoors, while ensuring collision-free flight throughout. I
think that kind of synergy between GPS-reliant systems and our new FLA
capabilities could be very powerful in the relatively near future.”

------------------


And of course, once that software is complete we then have autonomous
flying taxis for people.


BillK