Here’s how it works: The drones learned to identify trails using deep learning neural networks. This is the same process like the one Google’s Deep Dream used to create those super-weird images from last summer. Only instead of looking at a picture of salad and breaking it into dog faces, this network reads forests to find the paths that look like they’re supposed to be there. Don’t expect rescue drones to find missing hikers just yet, but someday, quadcopters could be as iconic an alpine rescue tool as St. Bernards.
