16 June 2024
Why drones don't crash into each other (Part 1/2).
Discover how the trajectories of the swarm of drones are calculated to ensure that they don't collide with each other during the shows.
This work begins at the very beginning, at the very genesis of the project, and continues throughout the artistic creation process, as well as on the operational and administrative levels. In other words, we do everything we can to prevent the drones from colliding with each other.
Today we're going to take a look at two phases of this work.
1 - Choosing a flying site
It all starts with the first phone call, because when someone asks us for a quote for a drone show, we first look at the maps of the flight site envisaged by the customer.
Because as explained in our last article, for a drone show there is a need for a security perimeter, all around a flight zone, and all this takes up space, so we need to make sure from the outset that the flight site envisaged is suitable for containing: A flight zone, a safety perimeter that surrounds and confines the flight zone, as well as an area set aside for welcoming the public.
A flight zone is at least a volume of 100m frontage, 50m depth and 100m height, this to be able to have room to write in the sky, for example, but also to be able to produce 3D animations.
The sizing of the flight zone is very important, because to fly several hundred drones, you need room! This is why we have defined a minimum flight volume in our work process, so we sometimes have to refuse to fly in certain places, in order to guarantee a grandiose show visible to all.
Once the flight volume corresponds to the artistic needs, it is validated by the technical teams and passed on to the artistic creation team.
2 - Show design
First of all, the design of a drone show is based on two essential notions: space and time.
The available space is defined by the flight volume we discussed in the first chapter, and is measured in meters. This is measured in meters.
Available time is defined by the drone's maximum battery capacity. The unit of measurement is the fps. Fps stands for frame-per-second. Our drones have a frequency of 24fps, so one second is divided into 24 frames. This means that a ten-minute show will consist of 14,400 frames (10x(60x24)).
So in our 3D design software, we have a specific algorithm for drone shows that checks at each frame that each drone respects a minimum distance of 1.5 meters between them.
So for a 10-minute show with 400 drones, the algorithm will check over 5,760,000 values. If one of these values is less than 1.5 meters, an alert is displayed in our design software, so that the value can be corrected.
Once all the values have been corrected and validated, they are exported to a file that will be used by the remote pilot.
A flight file is therefore certified as compliant as soon as it is created, so it's impossible for a flight file to predict a collision between two drones!
In the next article, we'll show you how collisions are avoided when piloting a fleet of drones.
