MonoRace: Robust monocular AI for champion-level drone racing

TU Delft’s MAVLab presents MonoRace, a real autonomous racing drone that flies demanding courses using one forward-facing camera and an inertial measurement unit, without GPS or external tracking. The video combines real flight footage with onboard-camera views and technical visualizations; TU Delft reports speeds up to 100 km/h and victories over three former world champion pilots at the 2025 Abu Dhabi Autonomous Drone Racing Competition. Its onboard neural controller issues motor commands at 500 Hz, showing how capable a small, sensor-limited flying robot can be. By: MAVLab TU Delft, published at October 22, 2026.