Commercial drones are starting to be used for tasks like inspecting oil rigs and crops. But they still require a highly skilled human pilot, and even those that are semi-autonomous usually use prebuilt maps or access the data over a wireless link.

 

 

This quadrotor won’t bump into those pipes because it built itself a 3-D map of the space using its onboard sensors and computer.

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are making drones more in