Recently @Drone Racing League and @Lockheed Martin visited Austin, Texas as part of a series of drone races that pitted man against machine. The AIRR racing series stands for Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing and took place this fall in four US cities. This drone racing series brought together teams of programmers from around the world to compete for a one million dollar prize. Each team was given an identical drone to work with and had to program it to complete a course using code only as its pilot - no human interaction at all with the drone. And the winner of each AI race then had to race against a human pilot, in this case @Gab707 from @Drone Racing League This entire event is part of the @Lockheed Martin AlphaPilot program, designed to foster innovation in the artificial intelligence and aviation worlds.

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.

On Friday night in an old newspaper printing plant in Austin, the future of drone automation lifted off, accelerated and flew, nearly fast enough to beat one of the best drone pilots in the world. Gabriel Kocher, known in the professional Drone Racing League as Gab707, sat behind a net, wearing video goggles and steering his drone through five square gates on a short, curvy course. Next to him were four teammates from the MavLAB of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. They had already programmed their automated drone, which resembled a mini Stealth Bomber. Now they were watching to see if their code had made the drone fast and accurate enough to defeat Kocher.

"We're here to watch as robotics evolve beyond humanity." Since 2016, the human pilots of the Drone Racing League have competed to see who could whip a quadcopter around pylons and through hoops the fastest. On Tuesday, they'll get a new challenge: the fully autonomous RacerAI, a drone programmed to fly itself. Nine teams of programmers from around the world have have been coding for months to come up with the best software to control the Drone Racing League-designed RacerAI. Their work, along with the drone itself, will debut at the Addition Financial Arena in Orlando, Florida. The software needs to take advantage of the drone's four cameras, four propellers and Nvidia processor.

Three seasons down the line, the fledgling Drone Racing League (DRL) is still not a household name. But it continues to draw major broadcasters and is now set to make its debut on social media. For its upcoming world championship season, the DRL is making the switch from ESPN to the home of NASCAR: NBC and NBC Sports. For the first time, viewers will also be able to tune in on Twitter via the official @DroneRaceLeague account. For the uninitiated, the races consists of minute-long heats that see pilots -- with monikers, like "Jet" and "ShaggyFPV," that wouldn't look out of place in an eSports tournament -- flying custom-built drones through neon-lit shapes on winding tracks at speeds over 90 miles per hour.

The AlphaPilot challenge asks participants to design AI technology that allows autonomous drones to beat human-piloted drones in a race. Drone racing could soon get a boost from AI. Lockheed Martin, the Drone Racing League and NVIDIA launched a challenge Wednesday called AlphaPilot, which asks participants to create artificial intelligence technology that allows autonomous drones to out-race human-piloted drones. "Put that computing power at the edge, and do it in such a way that it can beat those human pilots who trained months or years to get to that level," Lockheed Martin Chief Technology Officer Keoki Jackson said at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco on Wednesday. The challenge opens later this year and the races will be held during the Drone Racing League's new Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing Circuit starting next year. The grand prize winner will get $1 million.

Drones could soon be flown by autonomous AI pilots if Lockheed Martin has any say. The aerospace giant is partnering with the Drone Racing League to pit humans and AI against one another to see which can navigate a drone through a high-flying course the fastest. Called the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge, teams must craft AI system based around Nvidia's Jetson deep learning technology and fly the drone without any pre-programming or human intervention. Lockheed Martin is partnering with ESPN's Drone Racing League to pit humans and AI against one another to see which can navigate a drone through a high-flying course the fastest The first team that can outrun a human DRL pilot wins a $250,000 reward, while the grand prize winner can claim up to $1 million. The winning AI system could spell the future of autonomous drone operations, according to Lockheed Martin.

One cold, dreary afternoon in 2014, Jordan Temkin took his drone to Chautauqua Park in Boulder, Colorado. He put on a pair of goggles that filled his view with the live video feed from the drone's tiny camera. He'd built the drone frame from scratch using a 3D printer, finishing it with parts he'd bought online. It took about a month for it to take off straight. Eventually, it could hover around his backyard, so one day he took it to the park and began gingerly flying around. You can still find the video feed of this first flight on YouTube. Temkin flies slowly and carefully at first, meandering around the asphalt path. But before long, he flies the drone up, over and then around a rocky peak before diving toward the ground and pulling up a split second before disaster. At one point, Temkin appears in the video, sitting on the asphalt path as the drone loops around. "It really felt like I was flying," he said.

Drone racing has become a big budget sport - and its biggest league has revealed the world's fast machine. Called the RacerX, the craft recently set a Guinness world Record of 179.9mph - despite weighing just 800 grams. The first prototypes of the drone burst into flames when hitting its highest point of acceleration, but the latest model, flown in Cunningham Park in Queens, New York, hit the record speed. The handbuilt drone completed the record attempt in Cunningham Park in Queens, New York. The Drone Racing League (DRL), set the record using the specially designed battery-powered remote-controlled quadcopter.

The team behind the Drone Racing League (DRL), which is in the midst of its second aired racing season, have just set a Guinness World Record for the fastest battery-powered remote-controlled quadcopter. The drone earning the title is the DRL RacerX, which was designed and built by Ryan Gury, DRL's director of product, and the company's team of engineers. The 800 gram drone hit a speed of 179.6MPH, but because the official record is the average top speed of both legs of a back and forth flight, the Guinness entry is 163.5MPH. "The record-setting RacerX represents the culmination of years of technological innovation by our team of world class engineers, and we're very excited to unveil the fastest racing drone on earth," said DRL CEO Nicholas Horbaczewski in a statement. DRL said that earlier versions of the RacerX burst into flames when reaching top acceleration speeds because of how much power was used.