MIT’s drone brain neutralizes hazards in disaster zones
Disaster zones are terrible places to follow a preplanned route. Maps can be incomplete, debris can move, and the next hazard may arrive from any direction at any time. MIT’s new navigation system builds a safe flight corridor around the possible future movements of hazards, helping a drone avoid collisions even without a prior map.
Called SANDO, the system plans routes through unfamiliar surroundings with a mathematical guarantee of collision avoidance, provided its operating assumptions hold. It does not need to know where obstacles are headed, only a reliable upper limit on how fast they can move. "The only thing the planner needs to know is the top speed the obstacles could reach," says Kota Kondo, who recently earned his doctorate in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.
Kondo’s interest in disaster-response robotics traces back to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. "I remember watching the response at the nuclear site...
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