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Purdue IDEAS Lab: GPS-free autonomous drone tracks targets through dense forest

Published 28 October 2026

Purdue University’s IDEAS Lab has demonstrated a quadrotor that tracks a running person through dense forest without satellite navigation, constructing a 3D canopy map in flight via lidar and inertial odometry, predicting target occlusion by trees, and handling obstacle avoidance entirely on onboard compute. A Russian drone channel covering the demo cautions that the map was likely prepared in advance and the presentation overstates operational readiness, noting that smoke countermeasures have already defeated similar autonomous tracking on other drones.

Pictures from the cited posts

Video UAV Development (UAVDEV)

Sources — 2 sources

Telegram channel, Russian side:UAV Development (UAVDEV) adversary28 Oct 2026 Open the post
Telegram channel, Russian side:UAV Development (UAVDEV) adversary28 Oct 2026 Open the post

Topicsdrones ai warfare

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