№ 01 Aerial

Peregrine

An 8-inch racing drone that flies itself.

Year: 2026
Course: 9 gates, AI Grand Prix virtual qualifier
Flight computer: STM32H7, custom firmware
Perception: Off-board node, over WiFi

FIG. I AI-GP VIRTUAL QUALIFIER · 9-GATE COURSE · 2026

What it is

Peregrine is an 8-inch autonomous racing drone. It's trapped within the walls of the 2026 virtual grand prix.

The virtual qualifier

The clips on this page are from the AI Grand Prix virtual qualifier: a nine-gate course flown in simulation with the autonomy stack in the loop. The render above follows one run through the course; the overlay clips below show the same kind of run from the drone’s point of view, detections and all.

How it sees

A YOLO keypoint model watches the camera feed and picks out gates: bounding boxes, corner keypoints, and a regressed centre. Ranges come from PnP on the keypoints and are fed to the control policy as targets. The model was trained on labelled batches captured in the simulator; the curves below show it converging over about a hundred epochs.

FIG. II PERCEPTION · GATE DETECTIONS · LIVE RANGES

FIG. III GATE · VQ-01

Banking between gates in the hangar course

FIG. IV BANKING · BETWEEN GATES

FIG. V RUN START · CLEAN RENDER

Training curves for the gate detector, about one hundred epochs

FIG. VI DETECTOR TRAINING · ~100 EPOCHS

Labelled training batches for the gate keypoint detector

FIG. VII LABEL BATCH · VQ2 · 07·2026