Watch a swarm of drones navigate a forest without crashing

A new navigation system enables a swarm of 10 lightweight drones to fly together without crashing into one another or obstacles, even in challenging places such as forests. Drones can compute their location and find a path to follow using a panoply of sensors, which can be expensive and unwieldy. Shrinking down a drone often involves getting rid of key components, impacting its ability to travel safely. Xin Zhou at Zhejiang University in China and his colleagues have developed a new method that reduces the size and hardware requirements of a drone while keeping its computing nous. The palm-sized, 300-gram drone uses off-the-shelf computer components powered by a 100-gram battery that can keep it aloft for up to 11 minutes. The drone has a camera that feeds real-time footage to its processing unit.