IEEE Spectrum February 12, 2018
Researchers at MIT have developed a new motion planning framework called NanoMap, which uses a sequence of 3D snapshots to allow fast-moving (10 m/s) drones to safely navigate around obstacles even if they’re not entirely sure where they are. The key idea of NanoMap is to store a history of noisy relative pose transforms and search over a corresponding set of depth sensor measurements for the minimum-uncertainty view of a queried point in space… read more. Video.
This figure shows how NanoMap evaluates motion plans (blue line), given a series of depth sensor measurements over time (gray triangles).