What do you mean? They are flying with a first-person view via the feed from the on-board video.

 

Yes, I am aware of that.

What I mean is that the "course," so to speak, appears to my untrained eye to be more confusing and sparsely marked than even the worst AutoX I've ever seen. There are many, many points at which the airplane could go in any number of directions (or must arbitrarily turn or reverse course) with no obvious markers to that effect which I can see.







Unrelated, because I just can't get enough of this girl, who for all I know could be young enough to be my daughter, and yet I just don't care:

 

I'm assuming it helps when you "design" the course (such as it is) and take many practice runs that don't make it into the Youtube video...

 

Wouldn't the drones be more competitive if they left out the human interaction part altogether?

Generally on a course such as this, the pilots would have been given ample time to pre-fly the course. I actually did think that they were fully autonomous though.

 

Fully autonomous flight is *extremely* difficult to achieve even when you're spending millions of dollars per unit. And even harder yet in a highly complex environment such as these RC airplanes are traversing.

To say nothing of the fact that you need something the size of, well, a military drone or cruise missile to carry the computational and sensor hardware required to deal with that kind of requirement.

You might be able to pull it off by putting the computer at a fixed location on the ground and having it operate the vehicle by remote control, but the aircraft would still need to carry a fair bit more sensor hardware than just a 2d visible-light camera to make it work.





Unrelated: Last one, I promise.

 

I figured by now they would have fully autonomous capability including environment detection and position + direction commands such that you could tell it to "go autonomously to point A and follow path 1 to point B, then go autonomously to point C and follow path 2 to point D" or just "go to point a, then go to point b, then go to point c using performance aggressiveness strategy 4".

Alas, all I could find were videos of the base station controlled demonstrations.

 

Been watching Star Trek: TNG, have we?

 

At IRCA 2015 I definitely watched a video of a quadrotor autonomously avoiding obstacles in real time and pretty absurd speeds in an outdoor environment using on board processing of visual data. Just saying it's totally possible now.


Also why do we still have YT tags and the quick link to use them if they dont work anymore?

 

This is supposedly all onboard, looks sophisticated enough to follow a pre-programmed course and maybe not run into opponents.

I want to see that!

 

^^This

Joe, if you look carefully you can see little bumps (cones) and flags in some of the critical areas indoors (as well as the obvious runs in the parking lot to help keep the pilots honed in on the course.

Here's another random video of a piloted competition. Not as thrilling as that other one, but when they finally show the video feed the pilot sees (1:40), you can tell it's essentially the same.

 

Drone racing anyone?

 

 

lol that was horrible. They were waiting for him to launch before they launch.

 

 

Sitar added a nice touch

 

Fabulous.

+1






Unrelated:

 

 

Joe, I approve of your ... dynamically changing signature. Carry on.

 

Destruction fix

 

" The downward thrust made by the exhaust gases escaping the HEADERS ALONE generates 800 POUNDS OF DOWNFORCE". Quoted and amazing.