Drone With Event Camera Takes First Autonomous Flight

A few years ago, Davide Scaramuzza's lab at the University of Zurich introduced us to the usefulness of a kind of dynamic vision sensor called an event camera. Event cameras are almost entirely unlike a normal sort of camera, but they're ideal for small and fast moving robots when you care more about not running into things than you do about knowing exactly what those things are. In a paper submitted to Robotics and Automation Letters, Antoni Rosinol Vidal, Henri Rebecq, Timo Horstschaefer, and Professor Scaramuzza present the very first time an event camera has been used to autonomously pilot a drone, and it promises to enable things that drones have never been able to do before. The absolute cheapest way to get a drone to navigate autonomously is with a camera. At this point, cameras cost next to nothing, and if you fuse them with an IMU and don't move very fast and the lighting is reliable, they can provide totally decent state estimation, which is very important.