Super-Lightweight Drone Autonomously Avoids Obstacles

The age of commercial and private drones is upon us, exemplified by increasingly common stories of drone mishaps and even the likes Amazon announcing plans to launch a drone delivery service in the coming years

But there may not always be enough handlers trained or available to control all the varieties of drones making their way into the skies, so one team from the Netherlands developed a lightweight unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can traverse the skies on its own

With a 28-centimeter wingspan and weighing just 20 grams (about the weight of four sheets of paper), the DelFly Explorer uses a small stereovision system, composed of two cameras and a tiny embedded computer, to avoid obstacles in its path Read more...