Drones can almost see in the dark

A conventional camera and an event camera (on the right) picture the same building. The latter reports changes in brightness for each pixel. (Image: UZH) To fly safely, drones need to know their precise position and orientation in space at all times. While commercial drones solve this problem using GPS, this only works outdoors, and is not very reliable, especially in urban environments. Furthermore, the conventional cameras mounted on drones work only when there is a high amount of light available, and the drone's speed has to be limited otherwise the resulting image is motion-blurred and cannot be used by computer vision algorithms. To solve this problem, professional drones use sensors that are elaborate, expensive, and bulky, such as laser scanners. First combination of artificial intelligence and robotics .