An MIT team has built a camera-free plane that can autonomously navigate its way through tight indoor spaces using only onboard sensors.
The robotic vehicle, which has a wingspan of two metres and weighs in at about two kilogrammes, was tested in a car park under MIT's Stata Centre where ceiling heights came as low as two and half metres. Using an onboard laser rangefinder, inertial sensors and a combination of two algorithms, the plane successfully traversed the car park's many pillars -- coming within a few centimetres of the obstacles at times -- in a seven-minute long, 35km/h journey. The technology behind it was announced at the 2012 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and detailed in a correspondingpaper.
By: Liat Clark, Edited by: Olivia Solon
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via Wired.co.uk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-08/13/autonomous-plane
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