Humans are still beating AIs at drone racing, for now

While AIs are increasingly beating us mere mortals at many things, racing drones is something we still have the upper hand at. The Drone Racing League (DRL) orchestrated its first AI racing competitions this year, with the final of a four-part series held in Texas earlier this month. The races aim to advance the development and testing of fully autonomous drone technologies for real-world applications including disaster relief, search and rescue missions, and space exploration. The DRL RacerAI is the first autonomous drone designed to defeat a human in a physical sport. The drone features the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier AI-at-the-edge compute platform in addition to four onboard stereoscopic cameras which enable the AI to detect and identify objects with twice the field of view as human pilots.