OT Drone displays

[Chris Hogg]

How do they do that?

[The Natural Philosopher]

Do what?

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

That depends on what that you are referring to, but even 20 or so years ago it was possible to display several model aircraft close to each other at the same time as long as you had a plan. If you look at some shots in a very old film called 633 Squadron, there were a lot of models in that all controlled at the same time and the film was then slowed down to make it look more like real aircraft cut in with cockpit scenes. I remember reading about it at the time. With modern kit I'd expect much more is possible. It might even be possible to automate it all.

Brian

[Andy Burns]

They'll certainly be flying an pre-programmed "route" on GPS with timed lighting patterns

[Chris Hogg]

The display over Edinburgh last night

A bit like a murmuration of starlings, but in lights. Presumably computer controlled, but very clever to stop them colliding. Do they have some sort of on-board collision avoidance mechanism?

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Brian Gaff (Sofa) brought next idea :

With CGI, absolutely anything is possible and it can look very real - or all most. The recent film 'Dunkirk' relied heavily on CGI, as did that war time north atlantic film with Tom Hanks.

I think CGI has taken away a lot of the 'believability' of films, where it is used to excess.

[The Natural Philosopher]

They certainly would have on board GPS, and their controls could all be tied to a single transmitter - RC used these days coded packets in a

2.4Ghz stream so a central computer and transmitter/receiver with access to the GPS info could in theory control the whole lot centrally.

[Andy Burns]

I accidentally flicked-over and saw part of the Strickly final, it had the contestants "shooting" balls of plasma out of their hands, seemed to be tracked by reflectors on their clothes

Highly tacky in this case

[Dave Liquorice]

3 nights, nicely faked actually, read the disclaimer at the end of each video. The drones were shot in the Highlands and superimposed on shots of Edinburgh. I don't think that was live either.

Some of the blurb mentions AI. though I expect that is more machine learning/training of a human designed algorithm to produce the desired output from a lot of data. Rather than the machine coming up with ideas/algorithms of how to get the desired output itself.

I don't think GPS on it's own could give positions fast and accurate enough to fly so close together in then real world with wind etc... It could certainly give each drone an idea of where it it is then use inertial and/or magnetic systems to do the precise control. Standalone drones already have that built in, they can hold a fixed position/course without the operator having to tell it which way to go and compensate for wind etc.

[Andy Burns]

GPS with real time kinematics and local comms from a fixed base station to the drones can give very precise and very frequent location info (e.g. 25mm at 8Hz)

[Dave Liquorice]

Presumably that data stream allows full access to each individual drone rather than "all fly left"?

[Dave Liquorice]

accurate

etc...

As I said "It [GPS} could certainly give each drone an idea of where it it is then use inertial and/or magnetic systems to do the precise control."

That's good enough. B-)

[newshound]

My first though was that it looked rather like the "sheep at night" video; very impressive until you realise it is faked.

Certainly the latest drones have collision avoidance, but basically forward facing and downward facing. I don't know if it is good enough to allow swarms to self regulate.

[NY]

You would probably need the drones (either singly or as a pack) to have a degree of autonomy and rejection clearly stupid instructions, to guard against RF interference (accidental), jamming (deliberate) or hacking - I'm sure the local scrotes would love to take over the drones to make them write rude words in the sky (as has been done for motorway matrix signs) or to crash them all.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

I wonder if we will ever see these drone delivery systems? Around here with trees and telephone wires etc, not to mention my long wire aerial changing all the time it would be very hazardous, and I think illegal if any flew over your property without permission. I can see it now, folk shooting them out of the sky as they pass over head. Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Yes these 360 degree cameras nowadays can give a whole scene to the cgi ers and let them play havoc with the scenery and what goes on in it after they have shot the footage.

I think the first time I noticed cgi being used before I lost my sight was a helicopter chase through a tunnel with the blades making sparks of the sides. Blooddy impossible they would just snap off and crash. Then there was a person running around the walls of a room which defied the law of gravity in another film. You do need to let your mind go so far with CGI if its supposed to be in the real world and not some marvel comic film.

In the old days when I could see, there were limits to CGI in definition or speed or both, as they used to use Amiga computers in films like Ghostbusters for the Marsh Mallow man, with its fuzzy definition and slight flicker, but stop motion for other things which lacked realism as the movements tended to be jerky as with the animated statue in that film.

Brian

[Richard]

One of many links:

[The Natural Philosopher]

yes.

RC is looking more and more like TCP over radio - every receiver has a unique MAC address and that allows a huge number of machines to all fly using essentially the WiFi spectrum. ,and sdeu to te demand for real time viewing the drones are using the same mechanism to stream pictures and telemetry back .

As others have mentioned gyros and accelerometers also make stabilisation in attitude and position a matter of onboard software, so that e.,g. 'move a foot left and hover' is something that a drone could easily do.

Absolute positioning needs GPS, or manual override, but once a datum is established the accelerometers and gyros can do the rest.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Modern radio control is cryptographically keyed to the transmitter.

You can't take over a model. Al you can do is block signals, and what that usually does is simply leave the model hovering or in the case of a plane, doing what it was doing...eventually failsafe programs will drop power and bring things to earth

[John Rumm]

Each drone is position aware, and may also have proximity detection of others near it. They "show" is built as a 3D animation using a limited number of pixels. Once the whole animation is done, the paths for each pixel can be extracted individually, and then uploaded to the drone responsible for that pixel. So each drone is autonomously responsible for playing its part.

So in theory they can run the show with no further interaction with the ground. However they are all linked by wifi to a central computer on the ground as well so that it can supervise the overall effect and start and stop sequences. You could also update the programming in real time as well - to say load different animation paths for different segments of a show.

(plus geofencing, and options to abort and land individual or all drones from the ground)