The world champion level results were achieved when using external motion tracking, not onboard camera. So, not as impressive as the title made it look.
Here's the video (from 2022) btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o6H7Xlv2A&t=1s
Here's the video (from 2022) btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o6H7Xlv2A&t=1s
> Until very recently, autonomous drones took twice as long as those piloted by humans to fly through a racetrack, unless they relied on an external position-tracking system to precisely control their trajectories. Swift, however, reacts in real time to the data collected by an onboard camera, like the one used by human racers. Its integrated inertial measurement unit measures acceleration and speed while an artificial neural network uses data from the camera to localize the drone in space and detect the gates along the racetrack. This information is fed to a control unit, also based on a deep neural network that chooses the best action to finish the circuit as fast as possible.
And here's a video that seems to have been uploaded today - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBiataDpGIo
And from BMSThomas' video, it's obvious their vision only system wasn't ready for prime time in 2022, but they were still working on it.
The tracking system was used during all of the races for data collection of both the autonomous and human-piloted drones, which is why the reflective markers are visible.
They did do some demonstrations of the drones controlled with the tracking cameras, and they were significantly faster, but the vision-based drones were definitely able to fly faster than the human pilots in some races.