Chip upgrade helps bee-size drones navigate

The team, co-led by Vivienne Sze, associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Sertac Karaman, the Class of 1948 Career Development Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, built a fully customized chip from the ground up, with a focus on reducing power consumption and size while also increasing processing speed.

The new computer chip, named “Navion,” which they are presenting this week at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, is just 20 square millimeters — about the size of a LEGO minifigure’s footprint — and consumes just 24 milliwatts of power, or about one-thousandth the energy required to power a lightbulb.

Using this tiny amount of power, the chip is able to process in real-time camera images at up to 171 frames per second, as well as inertial measurements, both of which it uses to determine where it is in space. The researchers say the chip can be integrated into “nanodrones” as small as a fingernail, to help the vehicles navigate, particularly in remote or inaccessible places where global positioning satellite data is unavailable.