New chip could help tiny robots traverse complex environments

A new chip developed by MIT researchers could help tiny, low-power UAVs avoid obstacles as they zip around tight corners inside an industrial HVAC system to check for gas leaks. The chip allows small autonomous robots and other battery-limited devices to construct detailed 3D maps of their environments in real-time using only about as much power as a single LED. A robot could use such a map to plan a collision-free path to reach its goal. Typically, generating such thorough maps requires power-hungry systems and a great deal of memory to build and store 3D representations of the obstacles in a robot’s environment. The MIT researchers took a different approach by combining an extremely efficient mapping algorithm with specialized hardware designed to accelerate its workload, which minimizes memory…