World's fastest AI-powered racing drone outflies the best human pilots

A drone powered by artificial intelligence (AI) has completed a championship race course faster than some of the world's best human drone pilots.

In a study published Oct.

14 in the journal Science Robotics , scientists created an AI system capable of pushing a quadcopter through a demanding course at over 60 mph (100 km/h), using little more than a single forward-facing camera, an inertial measurement unit, and a tiny onboard computer.

The system, called MonoRace, even won the 2025 Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League drone racing competition, outperforming every rival autonomous team and posting faster times than three former human world-champion drone pilots.

MonoRace accomplished this without the aid of GPS, external motion-capture systems, stereo cameras, or a preloaded map of the course.

The system is an onboard autonomous flight model created by researchers at the Delft University of Technology's Micro Air Vehicles Lab in the Netherlands.

Its name reflects its central design feature; "mono" refers to its monocular vision.

The drone relies on a single rolling shutter camera and monitors its own motion with an internal measurement unit (IMU) that gauges acceleration and rotation.

Flying at breakneck speeds The limited sensor package feeds a neural network, a machine-learning model that uses interconnected artificial neurons to learn patterns from data.

This neural network identifies racing gates and estimates the drone's position and motion to generate motor commands.

Then, it sends the commands to the four propellers at a rate of 500 times per second through the drone's flight controller.

The system fits a drone that weighs a mere 966 grams (2.13 pounds) and measures approximately 11.8 x 11 x 3.9 inches (30 x 28 x 10 centimeters).

Because the MonoRace hardware was so compact, lightweight and computationally efficient, the team was able to operate it entirely aboard the drone.

On the Abu Dhabi course, MonoRace completed two laps around 11 gates in 16.56 seconds, hitting a top speed of approximately 63 mph (102 km/h).