
Drones flying in formation acting as a 3D display (2018) - Schiphol
https://twitter.com/MachinePix/status/1184830194323984389
======
pjc50
The 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.

~~~
LeonM
I'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
And explosions. The drones are pretty but unless they explode they're no
substitute for fireworks.

~~~
Razengan
Anything can be made to explode.

~~~
killjoywashere
Except a black hole. And fundamental particles. And bits. And verbs.

~~~
Razengan
> _Except a black hole._

The Black Hole Bomb and Black Hole Civilizations - Kurzgesagt:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-
bY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulCdoCfw-bY)

------
Schiphol
I 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
I 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
Differential 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
I 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
How does this work? How are all the drones capable of locating themselves in
space with such precision? Anybody have any information on this?

~~~
openasocket
Don'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.

------
tyingq
Somewhat 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
Ahh, 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
Make 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
There'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)

------
Wowfunhappy
Well, that's one way to make a 3D display. Forget all the eye trickery stuff,
just place the pixels in actual 3D space.

------
013a
ODESZA 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)

------
wpdev_63
I'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
I 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
GPS could be augmented by a ground-based system.

Similar to how WAAS works for aircraft, it's GPS plus a ground "enhancer".

~~~
ne9xt
see 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.

------
empath75
Did the world really need a way to put giant glowing fucking ads in the sky.

~~~
davinic
Nope, but we'll be seeing more of it: [https://futurism.com/startrocket-giant-
ads-night-sky-cubesat...](https://futurism.com/startrocket-giant-ads-night-
sky-cubesats)

~~~
peeters
I 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.

------
bovermyer
I would love to know if this is cheaper than fireworks for municipal displays.

~~~
ttul
Assume 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.

~~~
nexuist
>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
> 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
Here's a thought. What if drones also projected sound, not just light?

~~~
WiseWeasel
Sound audible from that distance to the audience area for this thing would
require a lot of power.

~~~
bovermyer
What if they weren't at that distance, though? Say... within two meters?

------
rpmisms
Intel shooting 2018 star drones.

Shooting with what?

~~~
bovermyer
They're "shooting star" drones. They're not "star drones" being shot.

~~~
rpmisms
I'm aware. The title is ambiguous, and sounds like Intel likes them some old
fashioned skeet shootin'.

------
benbojangles
The 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.

