Faster, more nimble drones on the horizon
There’s a limit to how fast autonomous vehicles can fly while safely avoiding obstacles. That’s because the cameras used on today’s drones can only process images so fast, frame by individual frame. Beyond roughly 30 miles per hour, a drone is likely to crash simply because its cameras can’t keep up. Recently, researchers in Zurich invented a new type of camera, known as the Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS), that continuously visualizes a scene in terms of changes in brightness, at extremely short, microsecond intervals. But this deluge of data can overwhelm a system, making it difficult for a drone to distinguish an oncoming obstacle through the noise. Now engineers at MIT have come up with an algorithm to tune a DVS camera to detect only specific changes in brightness that matter for a particular system, vastly simplifying a scene to its most essential visual elements. The results, which they presented this week at...