Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance for Quadrotors with Event Cameras (Science Robotics 2020)

Today’s autonomous drones have reaction times of tens of milliseconds, which is not enough for navigating fast in complex dynamic environments. To safely avoid fast moving objects, drones need low-latency sensors and algorithms. We depart from state of the art approaches by using event cameras, which are novel bioinspired sensors with reaction times of microseconds. Our approach exploits the temporal information contained in the event stream to distinguish between static and dynamic objects and leverages a