Teaching a robot drone to play better dodgeball.

image screenshot: ailabRPG

Researchers at the University of Zurich have constructed a robot drone in a quadcopter that is able to see an object that is thrown or kicked at it and take evasive maneuvers, all without using an external tracking system.

While this is great for the drone, maybe not so great for humanity. I guess we’ll see.

University of Zurich’s Robotics and Perception Group recently showed off an autonomous quadcopter that uses motion sensors to dodge balls that are thrown at it. The drone uses special motion-detection sensors which can identify pixel-by-pixel changes in a scene in microseconds. A regular camera takes milliseconds to do the same thing because those typically compare entire frames. The result of using the motion sensor is that this drone is incredibly fast at dodging objects.

via technabob who appears to have seen it on geekologie who saw it on boing boing.