A drone is a body for a computer. Inside its electronic brain, the moving vessel matches input from sensors, like cameras, to motion, like the spinning of rotor blades. Which makes it all the more remarkable when this little autonomous drone, using only onboard computing and a camera, can fly through a narrow slot, oriented at 45 degrees, traveling at over 10 mph. It isn't the first robot to fly through windows, but it does so at speed, with a bare minimum of equipment, and requires no outside sensors or power supply to do so. And it can even fly at 90-degree angles.

Quadrotors are capable of doing some incredible stunts, like flying through narrow windows and thrown hoops. Usually, when we talk about quadrotors doing stuff like this, we have to point out that there are lots of very complicated and expensive sensors and computers positioned around the room doing all of the hard work, and the quadrotor itself is just following orders. Vijay Kumar's lab at the University of Pennsylvania is often responsible for some of the most spectacular quadrotor stunts, but their latest research is some of the most amazing yet: They've managed to get quadrotors flying through windows using only onboard sensing and computing, meaning that no window is safe from a quadrotor incursion. When you watch quadrotors flying indoors, if you look closely, you'll almost always see a motion-capture system in the background: Arrays of external cameras mounted on the walls that work together to collect very precise positional information hundreds of times every second. With the data that a system like this provides, a computer has no problem issuing very precise commands to a quadrotor flying under remote control to get it to do just about whatever you want.