How an Autonomous Drone Flies With Deep Learning

Autonomous cars haven't even fully hit the roads yet, and companies are already touting the potential benefits of autonomous drones in the sky – from package delivery and industrial inspection, all the way to modern warfare. But a drone presents new levels of challenges beyond a car. While a self-driving car or land-based autonomous robot at least has the ground underneath it to use as a baseline, drones potentially will have a full 360-degree space to move around in and must avoid all of the inherent obstacles and pitfalls associated with this. Speaking at the 2017 GPU Technology Conference (GTC), a team of engineers from Nvidia believe the solution to having freely autonomous drones lies in deep learning. Their research has already yielded a fully autonomous drone flight through a 1 km forest path while traveling at 3 m/s, the first flight of its kind according to Nvidia.