Video shows fast flights of a small drone built by the National Robotics Engineering Center (NREC) of Carnegie Mellon University upon the Cube Orange flight controller, flying at ~3m/s through tight passages and avoiding static / moving obstacles.
No prior information about the environment or visual fiducial is used. The aerial system detects free space by collision avoidance technology using range data from a front-facing depth camera and guides the drone to fly through the free space. State estimation is provided by a rear-facing tracking camera.
All custom software runs on a Raspberry PI 4B computer with an 1.8GHz ARM processor. The collision avoidance and path following modules together consume only ~20% of a single core on the computer.
