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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, its… a drone named SUPER! Engineers from Hong Kong have just designed a drone that can zoom through forests at night without hitting any trees or branches. This owl-like ability is quite the feat!

A fast flying drone needs to make snap decisions on where to go and it may not know about all the obstacles around it. If you imagine sprinting through a forest, you can imagine how easy it’d be to miss seeing something important. And since you’re going fast, you really don’t have much time to react before you run into a branch!

The engineering team went about solving these problems with special equipment and computer programming. Some fast-flying drones use high speed cameras to navigate challenging obstacle courses. But cameras don’t work at night. So, the SUPER engineers used a technology called LiDAR.

LiDAR sensors send out laser beams and then measure where the lasers bounce off objects. This tells the sensor where the objects are. LiDAR isn’t perfect but it works at night, and it makes detailed 3D maps of the environment as the drone flies.

Now that SUPER could sense its surroundings, the next challenge was programming the autopilot to think quickly. The engineers came up with a two-part strategy. First, the autopilot calculates the safest route that sticks to the areas the drone knows for sure are clear of obstacles. Second, the autopilot calculates the fastest route that cuts through places it hasn’t scanned properly yet. As the drone flies, it switches between these two options, finding a fast yet safe compromise.

Finally, the engineers put SUPER through all kinds of tests and obstacle courses. In some of these tests, SUPER reached speeds of 20 metres per second (that’s 72 kilometres per hour)! In one of the most complicated challenges, SUPER had to follow and fly above a person running through the woods. The team hopes that one day SUPER will follow and support human superheros who are responding to a disaster. Go SUPER!