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Good news for hikers and mountain climbers that often lose their way on the distant forest trails. Swiss researchers have developed a drone that is capable of navigating the rough terrain better than humans with the help of artificial intelligence. The scientists eventually want a fleet of rescue drones that can "swarm forests in search of missing people" - working along with their human counterparts.

"While drones flying at high altitudes are already being used commercially, drones cannot yet fly autonomously in complex environments, such as dense forests. In these environments, any little error may result in a crash, and robots need a powerful brain in order to make sense of the complex world around them," said Davide Scaramuzza, who led the project for the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the University of Zurich, reported Washington Times.

The researchers say that their latest quadrocopter can be deployed rapidly in huge numbers that can work together with human rescue team. "Instead of relying on sophisticated sensors, the drone uses very powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms to interpret the images to recognize man-made trails. If a trail is visible, the software steers the drone in the corresponding direction," explained fellow researcher Alessandro Giusti.

According to the researchers, the research was highly complex. The team hiked on several trails leading to Swiss Alps and captured as many as 20,000 images of the terrain with the help of a camera mounted on their helmets. "The effort paid off: When tested on a new, previously unseen trail, the deep neural network was able to find the correct direction in 85 percent of cases; in comparison, humans faced with the same task guessed correctly 82 percent of the time," Mr. Giusti reports in his analysis.

As the researchers still work on perfecting the prototype, the scientists add, "Now that our drones have learned to recognize and follow forest trails, we must teach them to recognize humans," says Mr. Scaramuzza, as reported by Washington Times