TU Delft researchers took observations from the insect world and apply them to a 56-gram flying drone equipped with a tiny camera and a cheap processor. The researchers created an indoor obstacle course and several snapshots images for the drone to reference. Snapshots were placed with as much distance between them as possible to ensure reduced the number of total images the drone had to store. That, in turn, means the drone required less memory capacity.
The minimalist drones were able to home-in on a memory-stored snapshot and move from point to point through the course like a chain link before eventually returning to its home base. In the end, the drone was able to successfully travel 100 meters around the course using just 0.65 kiloBytes of memory. All of the visual computing needed for the insect-inspired robot to complete the course occurred on a common microcontroller often found in cheap consumer electronics.
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