Due to their limited battery, speed is of the essence when drones are completing tasks like searching for survivors on a disaster site, inspecting a building or delivering cargo. The routes they take are sometimes complex and narrow, requiring precision flying.
Up to now, the best human drone pilots would always outperform autonomous systems in drone racing, according to researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) in Switzerland.
But they have now created an algorithm that can find the quickest trajectory to guide a quadrotor – specifically a drone with four propellers – through a series of waypoints on a circuit.
“Our drone beat the fastest lap of two world-class human pilots on an experimental race track”, said researcher Davide Scaramuzza.
“The novelty of the algorithm is that it is the first to generate time-optimal trajectories that fully consider the drones’ limitations.”
Previous works were not optimal because they relied on simplifications...