An Indian-origin professor at Purdue University in the United States has demonstrated an autonomous drone capable of following a person through dense forests without relying on GPS, pre-existing maps or cloud computing.
One of its key features is occlusion prediction, which allows the system to estimate a person’s likely direction when obstacles temporarily block the camera’s view. Explaining the technology, Bera wrote, “True Embodied AI must run on the chip, not in the cloud. Separately, Purdue University announced in November 2025 that Bera’s team had secured a five-year, $1.5 million agreement with the US Army Research Laboratory to develop autonomous aerial and ground robots capable of operating without GPS.
The drone processes navigation decisions on its onboard computer, allowing it to operate in environments where satellite signals and internet connectivity may be unreliable, according to a report by TechSpot .
