Why You Should Be Glad That Quadrotors Have Learned to Dodge Swords

When that quadrotor fencing video showed up everywhere last month, we asked Ross Allen, the Stanford PhD candidate (and fencer) responsible for the research, if he'd be willing to talk to us about it. He said sure, except his thesis defense was that Friday, so would we mind waiting a bit? It's been a bit, and after a successful defense, Dr. Allen is somehow not sick and tired of robots and answered a bunch of our questions about quadrotors, swords, and why mixing them is such a great idea. Here's the video that you (and a couple hundred thousand other people) probably saw a few weeks ago: The swordplay is cool, but even cooler is the fact that this is the first demonstration of truly "real-time kinodynamic planning" on a quadrotor system navigating an obstructed environment. Or at least, that's what this recent paper from Allen (along with his colleague Marco Pavone) at Stanford's Autonomous Systems Laboratory says.