Watch Out, Pro Racers: These Drones Just Learned to Fly Solo

These days any old schlub can pilot a drone without cratering it, what with good old autopilot tech, but there are drone pilots out there whose abilities push the limits of human cognition. Drone racing is a truly insane endeavor (now with its very own Drone Racing League!) with human pilots banking around corners and through obstacles at over 100 miles per hour, navigating it all through the craft's onboard camera. It takes an almost unimaginable amount of coordination--but, alas, even this highly skilled job is in danger of automation. Researchers have developed a system that allows drones to autonomously navigate an obstacle course of gates with 100 percent accuracy--that is, the robots don't crash into something and explode. Not only that, because of the clever way the researchers trained the drones, the machines can adapt if a wily human moves a gate mid-run, completing a course that looks different than when they started.