Precision Quadrotor Flying

Originally Posted by billbo911

According to the text screens and audio, it is autonomous. To me that says it is done on-board.

I must admit, regardless of how it was done, it is impressive!

Autonomy can be done with off-board computing. A good example of this is the Player/Stage system for robot mapping and group algorithm work. It allows a "server" to do the bulk of the computations, and send commands to a group of bots. What's nice about a system like this is the robots can focus on the details of moving and avoiding obstacles, while the "server" can handle the mapping and localizing of the individual robots. It's quite a nice system, but it looks like ROS is going to upseat it sometime soon...
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Very cool video.