A<\/span>fter Wil Koch flew a friend\u2019s drone for the first time, operating it through \u201cfirst-person view\u201d 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\u2014a video headset, controller, and quadcopter drone, named for the four propellers that power it.<\/p>\n \u201cYou put the goggles on and they allow you to see live video transmitting from a camera mount on the drone,\u201d Koch says. It is \u201cby far, the coolest thing.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u00a0<\/span>Boston Drone Racing<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>as a new\u00a0<\/span>BU Spark! computing club<\/a>.<\/p>\n But because Koch thinks like a computer scientist, his mind soon turned to looking for ways that he could take \u201cthe coolest thing\u201d 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?<\/p>\n