In the future, autonomous drones could be used to shuttle inventory between large warehouses. A drone might fly into a semi-dark structure the size of several football fields, zipping along hundreds of identical aisles before docking at the precise spot where its shipment is needed. Most of today's drones would likely struggle to complete this task, since drones typically navigate outdoors using GPS, which doesn't work in indoor environments. For indoor navigation, some drones employ computer vision or lidar, but both techniques are unreliable in dark environments or rooms with plain walls or repetitive features. MIT researchers have introduced a new approach that enables a drone to self-localize, or determine its position, in indoor, dark, and low-visibility environments. Self-localization is a key step in autonomous navigation. Because MiFly enables self-localization with only one small tag, which could be affixed to a wall like a sticker, it would be cheaper and easier to...
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