Event Camera Helps Drone Dodge Thrown Objects

Davide Scaramuzza’s Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich pioneered the use of event cameras on drones. We first wrote about event cameras back in 2014: These are sensors that are not good at interpreting a scene visually like a regular camera, but they’re extremely sensitive to motion, responding to changes in a scene on a per-pixel basis in microseconds. A regular camera that detects motion by comparing one frame with another takes milliseconds to do the same thing, which might not seem like much, but for a fast-moving drone it could easily be the difference between crashing into something and avoiding it successfully.

In a paper recently accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Davide Falanga and Suseong Kim from Scaramuzza’s group take a look at exactly how much of a difference it can make to use an event camera on drones moving at high speeds. And to validate their research, they hurl soccer balls at a drone as hard as they can, and see if it can dodge them.