Published October 31, 2012 | 9:23 am Washington: Indian-American
computer scientist Ashutosh Saxena and his team at Cornell
University have created a flying robot as smart as any bird,
with a tremendous potential in search-and-rescue operations,
they said. Designed by Saxena, assistant professor at Cornell,
the flying robot, the size of a card table is able to guide
itself through forests, tunnels or damaged buildings. The
toughest part is keeping the object from slamming into walls and
tree branches. Human controllers can’t always react swiftly
enough and the radio signals may not reach everywhere the robot
goes, according to a Cornell statement. So, Saxena, who did his
B.Tech. in 2004 from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)
Kanpur, in a bid to overcome these limitations is building on
methods he previously had developed to turn a flat video camera
image into a 3-D model. He used such cues as converging straight
lines, the apparent size of familiar objects and what objects
are in front of or behind eac