Watch a drone dodging a SWORD as researchers test gadget in video

Picking a fight with a drone may seem a bizarre way of testing your theories - but one Stanford researcher has done just that. Ross Allen, a researcher at Stanford, decided the perfect way to test his drone avoidance system was to attack it with a sword. Wearing full fencing gear, he recorded a video putting the drone through its collision avoidance paces. Researchers are testing quadrotor drones with the ability to dodge obstacles and are showing off this achievement through fencing. A new video surfaced showing a human opponent taking jabs at a drone, which seems to'see' it coming and avoids being probed Stanford University's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics proposes a framework that uses'an offline-online computation paradigm, neighborhood classification through machine learning, sampling-based motion planning with an optimal control distance metric, and trajectory smoothing to achieve real-time planning for aerial vehicle,' according to the published paper.