Skip to main content

The DroNet algorithm teaches drones to navigate city streets like cars

Dronet: Learning to Fly by Driving
Drones can be dangerous. From hacking unprotected devices to falling from the sky, drones can cause a lot of digital and physical damage. As these little flying machines become commonplace in public spaces, researchers have even intentionally crashed them into mannequins and uncooked pork to study just how dangerous they can be. The result isn’t pretty, so pedestrians would be wise to be weary when they see one zipping toward them on a city street.

But a research team at the University of Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research Robotics in Switzerland may help put a little more consistency and certainty into how drones will move around us in the future. The researchers have developed a system that allows drones to navigate autonomously around obstacles and through unstructured streets by teaching the drone to act more like cars and bicycles.

“We have developed an algorithm that can safely drive a drone through the streets of a city and react promptly to unforeseen obstacles, such as other vehicles and pedestrians,” Davide Scaramuzza, head of the University of Zurich’s Robotics and Perception Group that developed the system, told Digital Trends.

Scaramuzza and his colleagues have called the training algorithm DroNet, short of Drone Network, a nod to the deep neural network that makes its magic happen. By observing and learning how cars and bicycles react to the dynamic environment of a city street, the DroNet algorithm lets the drones recognize static and moving obstacles, triggering it to slow down and avoid crashes.

“With this algorithm, we have taken a step forward toward integrating autonomous drones into our ‘everyday life,’” Scaramuzza said. “Instead of relying on sophisticated sensors, DroNet only requires a single camera — very much like that of every smartphone — on a drone.”

Most of today’s drones use GPS to navigate, which is great if they’re traveling above buildings but complicated if they are flying at low altitudes in densely populated streets. So, in order to teach the drone to navigate city streets safely, Scaramuzza and his team collected data from cars and bicycles in urban settings, and fed that data into the DroNet algorithm, which used the data to learn street etiquette — like staying in one’s own lane and decelerating when approaching obstacles.

Such a common sense system could become valuable as drones take up tasks like delivery and search and rescue. However, Scaramuzza and his team will first have to refine the algorithm to enable faster and more agile flying.

A paper detailing the study was published this week in the journal IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Editors' Recommendations

Dyllan Furness
Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more