Drone with Event Camera Avoids Fast Moving Objects

There are plenty of advanced drones that can detect and avoid obstacles autonomously. Most of them are designed to deal with static or slow moving obstacles. As this video from UZH Robotics and Perception Group shows, drones can be enhanced with event cameras to react and dodge fast moving objects in dynamic environments.

The approach:

exploits the temporal information contained in the event stream to distinguish between static and dynamic objects and leverages a fast strategy to generate the motor commands necessary to avoid the approaching obstacles.

The algorithm has a latency of 3.5ms. The drone is capable of avoiding multiple obstacles at speeds up to 10 meters / second.

[HT]