Artificial intelligence is undeniably good at playing games, regardless of its larger societal and environmental impact. In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue famously beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, and nearly two decades later, Google’s AlphaGo managed to defeat a human champion at the much more complex game Go. Since then, another AI seems to beat humans at incredibly complex video games like StarCraft or Dota 2 every few months. Impressive as these feats are, AI has mostly outperformed humans by making us play on its home turf, as in, simulated and structured environments. But now, a team of engineers at the Micro Air Vehicle Lab at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has built a lightweight smart drone that’s fundamentally altering that dynamic.
The team entered its AI-powered quadcopter in a high-profile drone race in Abu Dhabi that pitted AI-piloted drones against human-piloted ones. The niche sport, known as first-person-view (FPV) drone racing, has pilots steer remote-controlled drones through a series of small gates at blistering speeds of 60 to 100 miles per hour. They control the drone by using goggles that give a direct feed into a camera attached to the drone’s front. From a human’s perspective, it’s as if they’re flying through the sky.
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