MIT Develops Fully Autonomous Indoor Helicopter [vid]

I think such vehicles have tremendous military potential, particularly in urban environments, depending on how well one can meet the challenges of energy storage. I also think there's tremendous potential in police work and search and rescue.

Also, given the success of shows like Battlebots, I think there's some good potential for video media. The requirements for flying platforms to be lightweight versus the need to to be durable would make a flying robot combat show very interesting.

Given the four rotor stability, this seems like more of an interesting perception problem than a control problem. See http://heli.stanford.edu/ for examples of the latter.

I wonder which machine learning algorithms they are using. It looks interesting for Reinforcement Learning or ANNs.