Drones in the Streets
So you want drones in your cities, doing, well, whatever the heck you want them to do (take-out, packages, snooping …). The trick, of course, is to have the drones do their thing, without running into lamp-posts, cranes, people, wires, and so forth. The even trickier bit is that a lot of these — yes, even lamp-posts — have the habit of suddenly showing up one day, making for a constantly changing topography. The trickierest part is that, well, how do you get all this 3-D info? I mean, you can’t just have a plane flying around doing the “Google StreetView” thing, or even a drone being flown around. Loquercio et al. have come up with a remarkably nifty solution — which they call DroNet (•). It’s a fast (and tiny!) 8-layers residual network, which outputs a steering angle and a collision probability. (Think “if you fly straight ahead, you will crash” . ) They’ve also figured out how to collect the relevant data from cars and bikes, and it turns...