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Tech

This Drone Is a 3D Selfie-Bot

Just think of everything your 2D snapshots are missing.

​Is a selfie even really a selfie if it doesn't include the back of your head? What about your, you know, butt? For those of us desiring to give the world a more complete, entirely disappointing view, roboticists at the University of Zurich have programmed a drone to autonomously take three-dimensional selfies.

All of the planning and control occurs on-board the drone, courtesy of a smart-phone processor. The main catch is that the user needs to be laying down, but they're also free to wiggle and squirm while the thing does its work. So, it's not so much like taking a super-long exposure as it is creating a composite pixel by pixel. A challenging problem.

An earlier paper from the group explains, "A probabilistic depth measurement is carried out in real time on a per-pixel basis and the computed uncertainty is used to reject erroneous estimations and provide live feedback on the reconstruction progress."