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Drone Racing League Receives a $1 Million From Miami Dolphins Owner
An anonymous reader writes: Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross is investing $1 million in drone racing. The Drone Racing League (DRL), a New York startup, announced the investment today. The league hopes to recreate successes that other non-traditional sports, such as the X-Games, have had in recent years. The Wall Street Journal reports: "Earlier this summer, the League held a nonpublic trial race inside the abandoned Glenwood Power Plant in Yonkers. Six pilots standing on the power plant floor controlled their drones as they flew down the warehouse's hallways and through open windows. There are typically five to seven participants per race. Racers wear virtual-reality goggles that make it feel as if they are in the "cockpit" of the drone, which translates to video content. 'It's a completely immersive experience that'll make you feel like you're flying,' said Drone Racing League founder Nick Horbaczewski."
What could possibly go wrong???
Karma: Bad
Can you please not link to paywalled content? It only takes a couple of seconds to find an alternate article that is probably better than anything WSJ puts out. http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/13421113/miami-dolphins-owner-stephen-ross-investing-1-million-drone-racing-league
The same goes for space exploration
Welcome to the age of athletic fingers.
Why do they even need to have physical drones?
To encourage technological development. DARPA should be funding this. America spends over $200B/yr on manned military aviation. Next generation drones could eliminate most of that.
Getting tickets to a show where the human athletes will be chairbound.
Why don't they make them computer controlled? Then it would be drone racing instead of remote control quadcopter racing. Also, the winner would be the guy who can best do flight control algorithms, instead of somebody good at shoving sticks around.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Have them fly in the open and across people's backyards. It'll be an extra obstacle once the buckshot starts flying.
... but surely one could make it more interesting than that. I mean, these are net-connected drones - give them a base station with a lot of bandwidth and good response time, and the drones could be almost anywhere in the world, regardless of where their controllers are. Give them a base station like a Google Loon balloon - and more to the point, deliver them to the site by balloon - and you could operate them in an area no matter how hostile (unless someone sees fit to waste a very expensive anti-aircraft missile that can reach 32km for the purpose - and if such a missile could even target something with little radar signature and virtually no heat signature). For example, the balloon could enter a war zone, drops the drones which drop down to the surface, then try to achieve some (harmless) goal in the middle of an area where people are apt to literally shoot at them - with the competing drone pilots knowing nothing of where they are until the drop. So when it begins they're given maps, whatever intelligence is available, and a challenge. Eg: "Welcome to the Donetsk People's Republic! Your mission: deliver a Putin bobblehead, intact, as close as you can to Igor Strelkov, commander of the pro-Russian paramilitaries in the region, at his headquarters at the Regional State Administration building. Your drones have been painted in the colors of the flag of Ukraine and the words 'Gay Rights Are Human Rights'. Have fun dodging those bullets!"
I'll never forget the last thing grandma said to me before she died: "What are you doing in here with that knife?!?"
They will eventually end up with drone spectators if you'd completely cut the human factor .
Good luck with this. I doubt many are going to want to watch this live. The buzzing noise they make is really annoying and some of the videos I have seen have them flying so fast in small areas that it's hard to keep up with them. Maybe if you brought in better video/camera men and then edit it with live streams from the quad-copters it might be more interesting.
I also think it would be more interesting to see computer controller racers and see the interesting technology develop which would have a lot more applications than just racing. Sort of like car racing tends to feed ideas in to the cars we drive every day.
America spends over $200B/yr on manned military aviation. Next generation drones could eliminate most of that.
Yeah, not so much. When have you ever known military spending to go down in any meaningful way? Next-gen drones will doubtless be more expensive for the taxpayer than current-gen tech, just because. (Sure, we might need to buy a lot more of them to ensure we keep the bill growing, but you can be assured we'll do it.)
The only monetary advantage will be for the arms companies, lobbyists, and those taking their kickbacks, all of whom will have an even larger profit pool in which to swim. There's no way the average taxpayer won't continue to get shafted, though. The US leads the world in military spending (US$609.9 billion, or US$1,891 per capita) as of 2014, close to triple the nearest country (China, with US$216.4 billion) and there's no sign of that changing.
Sure, in the last decade our spending has decreased a tiny fraction, but only by a paltry 0.4%. Despite not being in any actual wars right now (the arm-waving "war on terror" doesn't count), we're spending more than we were pre-9/11 *or* during the Cold War.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
Why don't they make them computer controlled? Then it would be drone racing instead of remote control quadcopter racing. Also, the winner would be the guy who can best do flight control algorithms, instead of somebody good at shoving sticks around.
That's already a factor, because the sticks don't control the motors directly. On an affordable radio, you get nine channels, and you have a variety of knobs and switches which can make them do stuff, but you can also just map nine controls to the nine channels and send them straight to your copter. Hopefully your receiver has a PPM output, and then it only takes a couple of wires to get the signal to your flight controller, whatever that looks like. After that what happens is up to you, AFAICT most APMs come with something in them but you can throw it all away and write your own code from scratch if you want. Then the APM has PWM outputs to your various speed controllers. And now we've reached the limits of what I know about quads :p Except that you can apparently run a 250 size off of Li-Ions, so I'm going to have to start trolling for sales on speed controllers, motors, and props.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
RC Planes? What makes a 'drone' a drone is that it's being used for some specific purpose. Delivery, spying, dropping bombs, etc. Without that what else is there?
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When have you ever known military spending to go down in any meaningful way?
Yes. Military spending has declined after every major war. Military spending declined in the 1990s. Military spending has also declined considerably since 2010. As a percentage of GDP, it has declined even more. The military is under considerable pressure to do more with less.
Why do we assume it needs to be in person or live. This is the digital age. Add crazy obstacles with fire and rotating blades. At lease a few drones must be destroyed each race. Record all the video and then cut a movie for YouTube. Sell advertising. Build a following on the the web then start public events later.
They run on Lipos (but you're not wrong since Lipos are really Lithium-Ion Polymer and chemically nearly identical but come in "pouches" instead of rigid containers. Also you can run quads well over 500mm size off of Li-Ion. Almost all quads are electric because electric motors can control their speed very accurately. Gas motors are not so good at that, and so most gas-powered quads run their props at constant speed and instead vary the pitch of their props, complicating the system significantly.
About 9 controls... you can actually map more than that if you use a custom mix to make switches only take up part of a signal. Your throttle, aileron, rudder, elevator each take up one full channel because they are not on-off but can vary in strength. Most people just set up switches to take up an entire channel but you can make switches take up half a channel, or even a quarter of a channel, because the data they are sending is so simple (on/off, or hi/mid/low). So with an 8 channel receiver/transmitter, you could control throttle, aileron, rudder, elevator, a knob, and 6+ switches.
And yes, this is already partially the case. All quadcopters have flight controllers which run algorithms to determine how much each motor should be spun based on the inputs from the human. There are many different firmwares for these flight controllers, and pretty much all implement a PID system (or offer you the ability to choose from multiple different PID algorithms). PID essentially just means how the controller calculates values to send to the ESCs and how much it tries to self-level in various regards.
I said "in any meaningful way". Sure, there are spikes that return to normalcy immediately afterwards, but as you can see in the graph below (corrected to 2005 dollar equivalents) US military spending has been flat or slightly rising ever since the Korean War ended. Save for two brief periods under Carter and Clinton, there has been no noticeable reduction in our military spending in the last 60 years, and our spending for the last ten years isn't far off the peak set (very briefly) during World War II.
http://www.heritage.org/~/medi...
Our military spending is absolutely insane. Please don't expect to tug at my heartstrings prattling on about the "considerable pressure" placed on our military when we spend a far far greater fraction of our GDP on the military than anywhere that isn't either a crackpot dictatorship or an oil-rich state that's terrified a neighbor will decide to come in and steal their oil.
Somehow, other first-world nations like the UK, Canada, Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Japan and many others all manage to make do on 1/3 to 1/2 our spending as a fraction of their own GDP. Our spending on the military is absolutely obscene -- economies of scale due to our population and the fact that we're isolated from any countries that might wish to do us harm suggest that all else being equal, we should be spending *less* for the same level of safety not two to three times *more* than any comparable nation. Especially since the US being the world's police force and a defender of good hasn't been true for decades -- we're content to sit by and see others wronged so long as we don't lose any money from it.
Then it wouldn't just be a matter of who can make a faster drone, but who could program a better racing AI.