One-eyed robot learns to see in weightlessness

A small drone taught itself to judge distances using only one eye during trials aboard the International Space Station, ESA-backed researchers have reported. Although humans can effortlessly estimate distances with a single eye, robots still lack this capability. "It is a mathematical impossibility to extract distances to objects from one single image, if the object has not been encountered before," explains Guido de Croon from Delft University of Technology, one of the investigators. "But if we recognise something to be a car, then we know its physical characteristics, and we can use that information to estimate its distance from us. A similar logic is what we wanted the drone to learn during our experiment."