Purdue's GPS-free forest-tracking drone draws surveillance concerns from ex-Googler
deliprao · x · 2026-10-27
- Purdue's IDEAS Lab built a drone that tracks a person running through forests without GPS: LiDAR-inertial odometry builds a 3D map in flight, with onboard occlusion prediction and obstacle avoidance. It's a research demo pitched for search and rescue; real-world performance is unproven.
- Quoting the demo, ex-Googler Delip Rao raises concerns: his past government-funded projects—email metadata "to catch bad guys," low-resource MT actually targeting Pashto and Dari—suggest "search and rescue" framing deserves skepticism.
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