Space drone learns how to see with one eye in zero-G

Here's how the SPHERE drone did it despite all those difficulties: first, it zoomed around the station's Japanese module using its 12 gas thrusters, recording everything in sight with two cameras. Before all these, though, the team tested their learning software on a quadcopter in sets they built at the Delft University of Technology. "It was very exciting to see a drone in space learning using cutting-edge artificial intelligence methods for the very first time. In space applications, machine learning is not considered a reliable approach to autonomy: a'bad' learning approach may result in a catastrophic failure of the entire mission."