Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

China's Bungled Drone Display Breaks World Record (bbc.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the flight-of-imagination dept.

Chinese company EHang has broken the Guinness World Record for the most drones flown simultaneously, despite them failing to coordinate for a light show. The company programmed a fleet of 1,374 drones to fly in set patterns, "but failed to spell out the date and the record-setting number of drones," reports the BBC. From the report: The South China Morning Post called the event an "epic fail." The record was previously held by U.S. technology company Intel, which flew 1,218 aircraft at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games in February. Intel's show was pre-recorded before being aired during the opening ceremony, due to "possible freezing weather and strong winds." According to the South China Morning Post, EHang was paid 10.5 million yuan ($1.65 million) for the Labor Day performance in the north-western city of Xi'an. You can watch a video of the drone display here.

8 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Reporting by Daralantan · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "The South China Morning Post called the event an "epic fail."" And promptly had their social scores plummeting into the negatives....?

    1. Re:Reporting by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve · · Score: 2

      "The South China Morning Post called the event an "epic fail."" And promptly had their social scores plummeting into the negatives....?

      Well, SCMP is in Hong Kong so it's a little different because...
      1) What happens or is said in Hong Kong (mostly) stays in Hong Kong.
      2) Hong Kong still has some autonomy and I haven't yet read about the social scores idea being used there - yet.
      3) SCMP is in English, so its target audience is actually mostly foreigners or locals with really good English skills.

  2. The New Fireworks? by coofercat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Are co-ordinated drone displays the 'new fireworks'? Fireworks are cool, but they're not 100% predictable, and they're noisy/smokey etc. I wonder though as this technology develops, and as 'heavy' drones become cheaper and more plentiful, if we'll see more of these sorts of displays for big annual events around the world?

  3. China's? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

    Why does the headline attribute this to "China"? It's a private company.

    --
    const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
    SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    1. Re:China's? by tinkerton · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I noticed that too
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
      But even if they bungled up somewhere, the end result still looks pretty cool. The main emphasis shouldn't be on 'bungled'. Too much propagandishness to me.

  4. Yes and no. They're called ... by raymorris · · Score: 3, Informative

    The word "drone" is used for two very different things.

    Actual drones fly autonomously, and are normally fixed wing airplanes. Examples include the MQ-1B Predator, RQ-7B Shadow, and MQ-9 Reaper.

    What this article calls "drones" are RC quadcopters. As the article mentioned, they were flown from by the ground, by radio, just like the RC planes that starting gaining popularity 80 years ago. Quadcopters are fun toys. Because of some fundamental physics, quadcopters get dramatically less efficient as they get larger. The concept works quite well for a toy three inches across. Efficiency drops as you approach the larger popular size, which is 250mm (10 inches) across. Once you get up to about a meter across you're hitting the practical limit. You CAN build one bigger, but it's performance and especially flight time completely sucks compared to a plane or helicopter of similar size. You're never going to put thousands of pounds of military equipment and weapons systems on a quadcopter; it just doesn't make sense.

    Can a military use small, unmanned aircraft effectively? Absolutely, and that's been US military doctrine for most of the time since cruise missiles were developed in the 1970s, and especially since the Tomahawk in 1983. Several proposed new aircraft have been cancelled in favor of missiles, which can carry out the same mission at lower cost, in dollars and lives. The venerable B-52 can quickly carry TWENTY AGM-86 cruise missiles to within 1500 miles of the targets, anywhere in the world, and those missiles then autonomously fly the last 1,500 miles to their targets.

    There's really little military need for small, low-performance aircraft to fly around in patterns. Generally, you want to get to the target and destroy it quickly. That's what missiles do. Other aircraft can loiter maintaining situational awareness, watching, then call the missile strikes. There's little need for the recon aircraft to also be the one to strike the target.

    In some hostile airspace, against moving targets or targets you can't get good satellite views of, you sometimes want to look, then fire a weapon. For that you want fast, stealthy aircraft which carry enough armament to destroy the target in one strike. A large group of slow, non-stealthy toys, which carry no more than a hand grenade, isn't particularly useful.

    1. Re:Yes and no. They're called ... by raymorris · · Score: 2

      To put it simply and quickly:

        The thrust developed by a prop at a given RPM is proportional to its diameter to the 2/3 power, multiplied by its pitch. In other words, the cube root of the diameter squared. As an easy example let's use a prop of diameter 1, pitch 1, and a prop of diameter 10, pitch 10.

      1 squared is 1, and the cube root is 1, pitch is 1, so the thrust is 1 unit.
      10 squared is 100, the cube root is 4.6, pitch is 10.
      So a prop 10 times as big produces 46 times the power.

      A quadcopter "10 times as big" is 10x width, 10x height, 10x depth, so 1,000 times the volume, and approximately 1,000 times the weight.

      When you scale up 10 times, you get a thousand times the weight, and 46 times as much thrust. That's a big problem.

      We saw earlier that a prop 10 times the size gives 46 times as much thrust, so we want bigger props. On a quadcopter the radius of the prop is limited to no more than half the diagonal across the fuselage. We can only get bigger props by making the whole craft bigger, but that makes the problem worse. So we need a way to have a prop bigger, without making both the width and height bigger.

      Enter the helicopter. The helicopter design lets us put a 46â(TM) prop in a fuse that's only 9' wide. That's why you see people flying around in helicopters, and you don't see people flying around in quadcopters.

  5. Re:We still have the record for most people / manu by cozytom · · Score: 2

    Actually there were "hobbiest" RC model aircraft in the 1930's.

    The 1950's had small tube based RC units.

    http://www.stormthecastle.com/...