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Technology

Command robot planes with a wave of your arms

By Paul Marks

21 March 2012

WAVE your arms in the right way, and a drone taxiing along a runway will stop, turn and find a parking spot.

Drones on aircraft-carrier decks, but humans control them during taxiing. With piloted aircraft, navy flight-deck marshals use a to instruct pilots to, for instance, cut their engines, open weapon bay doors or move to a refuelling bay.

To test whether these gestures could be recognised by a computer, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues wrote an algorithm that analyses 3-second clips from a depth-sensing…

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