4 November 2015 Last updated at 20:34 GMT
The team working on the project at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab are making their algorithm open source so that others can use and adapt it.
One of the developers, Andrew Barry, told the BBC he believed the technology could appear within commercial products within two years.
Researchers in the US are teaching high-speed drones how to avoid obstacles in their flight path with very little notice.