Drone Racing League Receives a $1 Million From Miami Dolphins Owner 46
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."
Battle bots in the air... (Score:2)
Article is Paywalled (Score:1)
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
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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.
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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 thos
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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.
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Military contractors are being forced to tighten their belts and only spend 50 weeks a year vacationing in the bahamas.
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ht [heritage.org]
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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.
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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 co
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About 9
More challenging (Score:2, Funny)
Have them fly in the open and across people's backyards. It'll be an extra obstacle once the buckshot starts flying.
Power plant? Okay... (Score:3)
... 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!"
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But see, the question then becomes why you wouldn't do something like set up a "drone raceway" and give users the ability to control a drone there or send in their own (perhaps have two different categories, one for stock drones and one for user-submitted ones) to race. Pay $x as an entry fee and you can race a drone from the comfort of your own home computer. Given all the VR tech that's coming out at some point "soon", you could even add that as part of the experience (put on an Oculus Rift or similar hea
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Obviously one chooses the hardware to meet the task and not the other way around. Loon balloons are designed to basically be a floating cell phone tower. Like a cell phone tower, a tiny pocket sized device (for example, a cell phone, or a USB cell dongle) can receive the signal from dozens of kilometers away and maintain a two-way connection at 4G speeds (tens of mbps, more than enough for high quality realtime streaming video)
Why, exactly, can this not be applied to drones? Are USB cell dongles somehow pro
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Basically, something like this [skydrone.aero]. 1920x1080@30fps, automatic framerate reduction to prevent lag, and a bit over 150ms latency with latency reduction work in progress.
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... 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
How are you planning to get signal to the drones so that screen can turn on? You'd need a high degree of autonomy to handle the inevitable lag surges.
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Right where I wrote:
Aka, basically a floating cell tower, with the drones using cellular dongles. And since the "tower" is overhead, it'd be very hard to lose direct line of sight; one would expect excellent signal quality (barring electronic warfare being used against the drones).
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Give them a base station like a Google Loon balloon
Oh. Sorry for missing that. That would get a lot of attention you don't want.
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Which was, of course, followed by:
32km isn't something you can reach with a MANPAD - even most vehicle-mounted SAMs can't hit that (for example, the BUK missile that shot down MH17 has a maximum height of around 25km). It takes a very expensive missile to hit that high. And the homing systems
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A lot of the unevenness issues of streaming video over 4G are not that the connection drops out completely, but that the bandwidth changes as the drone moves around. Ignoring the easy line of sight when your "tower" is overhead, one can deal with this problem simply by using an adaptive codec designed to deal with sudden drops in bandwidth via sudden drops in quality / framerate rather than lagging imagery.
As for latency, it depends on what sort of latency one demands. No, you're not going to get the sort o
Good luck (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
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NASCARs actually sound pretty good, I don't think you'll find anyone at a race that will seriously tell you they 'put up with the noise', and it's kinda dumb to compare that to the noise a drone or rc plane makes.
However, the answer to everything is, as usual, fossil fuels. By using a can of butane and a stun gun you can have them sound and look like real jet engines - the ducted fan racers anyway. Your quads will probably sound like ass forever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKuq8T7KMa0
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Aren't these just (Score:2)
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What makes a 'drone' a drone is that it's autonomous. Purpose doesn't come into it.
We are all thinking old school. (Score:1)
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That was my thought. You can actually make it dangerous. Yes, sports are dangerous, but nobody's actually shooting at you during a football game.
Even Battlebots has safety rules about what you can and cannot use as weapons because of spectator safety (and legality, and cost). But get a special permit from the government to arm robots with real weapons (maybe limit the caliber so it isn't all one-shot kills), put the robots out in the middle of nowhere and make real-life MechWarrior (but with the pilots cont
It'd be more interesting if they weren't piloted (Score:2)