Neuroflight is the World’s First Neural-Network-Enabled Drone Controller
BU researchers are using competitive drone racing as a testing ground to hone AI-controlled flight
After Wil Koch flew a friend’s drone for the first time, operating it through “first-person view” where a person wears a headset connected to a video feed streaming live from a camera on the drone, he thought it was amazing. So amazing that he went out that same day and purchased his own system—a video headset, controller, and quadcopter drone, named for the four propellers that power it.
“You put the goggles on and they allow you to see live video transmitting from a camera mount on the drone,” Koch says. It is “by far, the coolest thing.”
First-person-view drone racing is gaining popularity among technology enthusiasts, and there are competitive races around the world. Just a few weeks after his introduction to the sport, Koch, a Boston University graduate researcher at the Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, founded Boston Drone Racing as a new BU Spark! computing club.
But because Koch thinks like a computer scientist, his mind soon turned to looking for ways that he could take “the coolest thing” and make it even cooler. What if, he wondered, you could leverage artificial intelligence to fly a drone faster and more precisely than the standard setup?