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Drones flying in formation acting as a 3D display (2018)
- tyingq 7y agoSomewhat terrifying to imagine what the military is going to do with coordinated drone swarms. Like a smart cluster bomb with no wasted explosions. I suppose, though, less unexploded munitions laying around afterwards.
- jacobush 7y agoAhh, I don't see how that last thing follows. I expect many expired, disabled and crippled drones lying around. Edit: I watched to video after reading your comment. That's fucking terrifying. It's hard to make scary "action" sci-fi nowadays, and China is working hard to make dystopian sci-fi look tame, too.
- ben_w 7y agoMake them smaller and give them a sharp pointy end. Ask the public to name it. Reject “Stabby McDroneface” as “it sounds like a joke”. Be surprised by the first amateur reproduction. Use the moral outrage to ban all drones — even those tiny little drones that can’t life a single jelly baby. Realise drones are still useful and make and expensive license scheme that doesn’t really scale up because it’s organised with industrial era thinking instead of information era thinking. And what is old is new again.
- pjc50 7y agoThere's already been reports of the use of toy drones for scouting and bombing in the Syrian civil war. Then there was that strange maybe-fake bombing attempt on Maduro: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-45073385 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-45073385
- markhowe 7y agoTake a nosey at Slaughterbots, a fictional 7min video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
- openasocket 7y agoThis sort of tech will probably be used to make better cluster munitions (though I wouldn't be surprised if this technology is already used in them), but I don't think there's much tactical value in this kind of tight coordination for a drone swarm. In combat you wouldn't want your drones this close together, one missile could take out a bunch of them at once.
- empath75 7y agoDid the world really need a way to put giant glowing fucking ads in the sky.
- davinic 7y agoNope, but we'll be seeing more of it: https://futurism.com/startrocket-giant-ads-night-sky-cubesats https://futurism.com/startrocket-giant-ads-night-sky-cubesat...
- 52-6F-62 7y agoOh my god it's like it's straight out of Wall-E. I really don't look forward to any of that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- peeters 7y agoI always wonder about people who see some awful technology in a dystopian sci-fi flick and think to themselves "I want to be the guy that invents that." The ability of people to sprint headfirst toward a shittier world if it means they can make a few bucks is just depressing.
- pjc50 7y agoThe most positive aspect of the drone aerial demo concept I've seen is that it's an alternative to firework displays that's silent, smokeless, generally safer, and re-usable.
- ben_w 7y ago“Safer” is a surprise. I would expect the actual danger of either to be smaller than the current error margin for the drones. Do you have a link?
- me_me_me 7y agoExploding chemicals setting things on fire if mishandled (anywhere from factory to actual show). As opposed to small drones falling? (Those are most likely micro-drones) I think much safer is more precise.
- mdale 7y agoFor example: https://youtu.be/T1iWcnSjfOM https://youtu.be/T1iWcnSjfOM
- LeonM 7y agoI'd argue that the noise plays a big part in firework displays. Like with racing, the noise is a big part of the experience. And this comes from someone who gets really annoyed by loud motor vehicles.
- rubbingalcohol 7y agoAnd explosions. The drones are pretty but unless they explode they're no substitute for fireworks.
- Razengan 7y agoAnything can be made to explode.
- Schiphol 7y agoI should have added to the title that this is from 2018. Apparently it's a swarm of 2018 drones. Does anybody know of a blog post where this is explained? In particular, choreographing the movements of the swarm looks terrifyingly hard.
- jrockway 7y agoI think you can simulate this all in advance and have each drone executing a pre-arranged gcode-like program. I'm guessing the complexity of choreography is similar to something like autorouting a circuit board. Other comments mention that using GPS for relative positioning is fine. The largest source of error in GPS is ionospheric delays, which will affect all these drones equally, so I can believe that. Meanwhile, the flight computer handles figuring out how much power each motor needs to move or maintain its position. What if there is high wind on the day that you want to do this? Either a single drone can remain stationary in that amount of wind, or it can't; if it can't, then you cancel the performance because there is no computer program you can write to suddenly give the drone more control authority. I doubt there is any additional complexity here; I doubt the drones are looking out for other drones and coordinating with each other. They just go to a set position at a set time at a set speed. Any complexity lies in the positioning; whether GPS + barometric altimeter + IMS (gyro/accelerometer) is enough to get the desired accuracy. It probably is.
- bprater 7y agoDifferential GPS is needed to achieve this accuracy. At some point in the future, vision systems + coded lighting may suffice, but for now, more elaborate tech is needed to keep these machines in tight formation.
- jrockway 7y agoI don't think differential GPS does anything here. It corrects for large-scale ionospheric delay error, which is going to be exactly the same for every drone at this scale. And they have WAAS receivers anyway, which provides better accuracy than differential GPS. (Maybe you mean RTK, which could help achieve centimeter accuracy.)
- ntavish 7y agoHow does this work? How are all the drones capable of locating themselves in space with such precision? Anybody have any information on this?
- ramigb 7y agoThis is for sure done programmatically, as you might've guessed. And I'd guess they've built a software that models these animations and treats each drone as a node in a plot and then drones move independent of other drones since their routes are already plotted for them by the software. So yes engineering wise this is amazing, both software and hardware, but the concept is not that complex. Think of it as SwarmTouch but without the human "puppeteering" the drones .. https://www.hackster.io/news/swarmtouch-lets-one-person-control-an-entire-fleet-of-drones-485a7853c88e https://www.hackster.io/news/swarmtouch-lets-one-person-cont...
- openasocket 7y agoDon't know about these drones specifically, but off the top of my head there are a variety of different navigation systems you could use to supplement GPS for extra precision. 1. Inertial Navigation: basically taking measurements of your speed and direction of travel and using that information to update your position. This is not very accurate, and the longer you go without some other guidance system the less accurate it will get, so I'm not sure how useful it would be here. But it's fairly easy to implement, you just need to give each drone the ability to measure its speed and direction, and you would probably want that to correct for wind anyway. 2. Terrestrial guidance, where you used some fixed landmark or set of landmarks and look at your position relative to it, which can be done with cameras or radar or lidar. Probably too expensive to use radar or lidar, and I'd worry about interference between drones. 3. Command-based guidance. Rather than having each drone try to figure out where it is, you have a separate system on the ground that looks at the drones and tells them where they are. Since you only need one of these command units, it wouldn't be too expensive to use radar or lidar, and no worries about interference. 4. Real-time kinematic GPS: kind of a mix of 3 and 4. You basically have some radio stations broadcasting, and the drones triangulate their position based on that. Not sure what kind of drones these are, but if they are the Intel Falcon 8+, they have GPS + intertial built in, and they are meant for survey work, so they might have the Real-time kinematic thing also.
- bovermyer 7y agoI would love to know if this is cheaper than fireworks for municipal displays.
- ttul 7y agoAssume each drone is $500. That’s $1M or so in total. If I were renting out these things for fireworks displays, I would probably want to recover a healthy return over my financing cost. Imagine I could obtain money for 10% - $100K per year against the $1M inventory. Then assume the drones depreciate to zero in three years - that’s another $333K. Operating cost is per-event. Assuming no cost for my time to operate the drones, the rental charge would have to be enough to generate $433K a year. Assume you can run 10 events per year. You thus have to charge $43K per event just to break even on the financing of the drones. Add in a few thousand for operating costs of each event and maybe its $50K? I don’t know what fireworks cost, but it seems likely to be within the same range to me.
- ChrisLomont 7y agoThe huge city shows cost a few million per year.
- nexuist 7y ago>Then assume the drones depreciate to zero in three years I'm not entirely sure you can make this assumption. Other than the battery, which would have to be replaced in 3 years, the rest of the electronics should hold up as it's just consumer grade smartphone parts. I guess the electric motors would be a strong replacement contender, but even then if you are buying in bulk it shouldn't hurt the budget too much. Maybe I'm applying my hobby perspective to the industrial world, but I don't really see a drone as "broken" until it suffers a gnarly crash that breaks the frame. Everything until then can be swapped out in a few minutes, and even if the frame breaks you can transplant the rest of it to another frame. It's not like the smartphone world where everything is soldered shut to save space.
- jrockway 7y ago> I'm not entirely sure you can make this assumption. Other than the battery, which would have to be replaced in 3 years, the rest of the electronics should hold up as it's just consumer grade smartphone parts. The drones not blowing up in 3 years just means you make extra money. If the cost is competitive when assuming the worst case, then that means you stand to make money if things go well.
- bovermyer 7y agoHere's a thought. What if drones also projected sound, not just light?
- WiseWeasel 7y agoSound audible from that distance to the audience area for this thing would require a lot of power.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoWhat's the point? There are much easier ways to get directional audio.
- benbojangles 7y agoThe scary thing is that this is using a not-very-amazing flight control system and if the better flight controller systems did this they wouldn't have to worry about stray drones or speeding up the video in post-production.
- wpdev_63 7y agoI'd imagine the software flying the drones would have to compensate for the downdraft of the nearby drones and the turbulence. It would be interesting to see the software side of things. Can't wait for the open source project.
- pjc50 7y agoI suspect it doesn't explicitly - provided it's got good enough positional information, it can just use all the traditional techniques of closed-loop control to get there and stay there. How it gets the positional information isn't clear. Some sources say GPS, I'm guessing that relies on the relative error being very small and not caring about the absolute error.
- eternalny1 7y agoGPS could be augmented by a ground-based system. Similar to how WAAS works for aircraft, it's GPS plus a ground "enhancer".
- ne9xt 7y agosee RTK GPS. uses a fixed ground station with a known position. the phase shift of the moving object’s gps signal is used to achieve centemeter-level precision.
- rpmisms 7y agoIntel shooting 2018 star drones. Shooting with what?
- aaron695 7y agoFake Lucky HN isn't to technical since it's kinda obvious. 1,500 drones And more importantly speed up. Source - https://youtu.be/KhDEEN4gcpI?t=110 https://youtu.be/KhDEEN4gcpI?t=110
- 013a 7y agoODESZA used what appears to be a simpler version this technology during their live performance at Coachella in 2018 [1]. It was definitely sponsored by HP/Intel. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZi2cN7LEfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZi2cN7LEfM
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoWell, that's one way to make a 3D display. Forget all the eye trickery stuff, just place the pixels in actual 3D space.
- teslaberry 7y agowhy don't they start putting fireworks ON drones to let them explode in special directions while they are already flying in formation. you can take a lot of the excess propellant out, and pack much more of the shiny colored flaming stuff to make for one hell of a precision directed fireworks display. this is so damn obvious to me , but no ones thought to do it yet.