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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."
... 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?!?"
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.
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.'"
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.