Purdue's GPS-Free Drone Tracks People Through Dense Forest With $1.5M Army Funding
Graham_dePenros · x · 2026-10-28
Purdue's IDEAS Lab demonstrated an autonomous drone that tracks a person through dense woodland without GPS or a preloaded map: onboard sensing and computation let it map the environment, avoid obstacles, and keep tracking by predicting the target's path when obscured by trees.
The US Army has committed up to $1.5 million over five years for AI-enabled aerial and ground robots that operate in GPS-denied environments, though the lab says it hasn't confirmed this funding supported the demo shown.
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