The New York Times A drone from the University of Zurich is an engineering and technical marvel. It also moves slower than someone taking a Sunday morning jog. At the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Madrid last October, the autonomous drone, which navigates using artificial intelligence, raced through a complicated series of turns and gates, buzzing and moving like a determined and oversized bumblebee. It bobbed to duck under a bar that swooshed like a clock hand, yawed left, pitched forward and raced toward the finish line. The drone, small and covered in sensors, demolished the competition, blazing through the course twice as fast as its nearest competitor. Its top speed: 5.6 miles per hour. A few weeks earlier, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a different drone, flown remotely by its pilot, Paul Nurkkala, shot through a gate at the top of a 131-foot-high tower, inverted into a roll and then dove toward the earth. Competitors trailed behind or crashed into pieces along the course, but this one swerved and corkscrewed through two twin arches, hit a straightaway and then blasted into the netting that served as the finish line for the Drone Racing League’s world championship. The winning drone, a league-standard Racer3, reached speeds over 90 miles per hour, but it needed a human to guide it. Mr. Nurkkala, known to fans as Nurk, wore a pair of goggles that beamed him a first-person view of his drone as he flew it. Artificial intelligence, or A.I., has been on a hot streak, besting humans in competitions over the past five years. AlphaGo, a program built by DeepMind, the artificial intelligence arm of Google parent Alphabet, went from learning the basics of the game Go to beating the world’s best human player in a little over three years. More recently, the A.I. AlphaStar, also by DeepMind, was able to beat a top player in the complex strategy video game “StarCraft II,” shutting out its human competitor five games to zero. But the real world can be an immensely noisy place, and many A.I.-powered, and autonomous, vehicles still struggle to excel in it. In 2017, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory built three autonomous drones and pitted them in a race against Ken Loo, an expert drone pilot. He easily beat them all. Darpa’s Fast Lightweight Autonomy program has been able to send drones through tight hallways at 45 miles per hour, faster than the one from the University of Zurich, but in a less complex setting and slower than a human pilot. A piloted drone swooping and arcing around a course while an autonomous drone hesitantly chugs through space is the difference between an N.B.A. point guard driving toward the basket and a toddler learning to walk. Onboard computers will get more powerful. Algorithms for developing optimal flight paths will become optimized. New image processing techniques will shrink the time it takes for a computer to understand what it sees from milliseconds to microseconds, while the human eye will always have 13 milliseconds of latency in processing visual stimuli. But that’s in the future. Right now, an autonomous drone completing a racecourse at a speed faster than 5.6 miles per hour will be an accomplishment. This year, a new competition will try to make sure autonomous drones are more nimble — and that they are truly able to act by themselves. “Right now, autonomous drones are a thing you’d only find in labs, being pioneered by a small, niche audience,” said Keith Lynn, Lockheed Martin’s program manager for AlphaPilot, an autonomous drone racing competition organized by the Drone Racing League. The AlphaPilot competition, which is sponsored by Lockheed Martin and part of the racing league’s new Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing Circuit, aims to drive interest and research into self-driving, or autonomous, vehicles. Nine teams will compete this fall, out