Feelin' Kinda Free
The fledgling sport of drone racing has pilots viewing the course through cameras mounted on their stripped-down, supercharged craft. SAMUEL J. FELL meets the US champion, in his home town of Brisbane.
Like a bat out of hell, the little
X-shaped machine, small propellers mounted at the end of each four arms, shoots
off into the distance. In a matter of seconds it’s no longer visible to the
naked eye, although you can hear it, buzzing through the trees at speeds of up
to 140 km/h.
It suddenly reappears from on
high and like a demented magpie at the height of nesting season, it swoops, pulling
up at the last minute and executing a series of barrel-rolls, ripping past the
two of us standing on the wooden deck of a house on a hill in Ormeau, just
south of Brisbane. It banks sharply, a left turn, and darts back into the
bushland, again invisible.
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| Chad Nowak |
Chad Nowak, standing beside
me, is the one controlling it. Via a set of goggles, he sees what his machine
sees courtesy of a small camera mounted on its nose, beaming its feed directly
back to him. A large silver remote controller hangs from a lanyard around his
neck, the machine operated by almost imperceptible movements of his thumbs on
the two small joysticks. He brings it back towards us, slowly now, and lands it
expertly on the wood next to my left foot, removes his goggles and grins at me.
Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of first-person-view (FPV) drone
flying.
Nowak is the current US National
Drone Racing champion, having won the inaugural event last July in California. The
Australian is the poster boy for FPV drone flying, a rapidly burgeoning aspect
of the growing drone industry, including competition racing. Having flown line-of-sight
remote-controlled vehicles and fixed-wing gliders since he was 14, the now
37-year-old is in high demand at events around the world. A year and a half
ago, he was mixing automotive lubricants in a factory. Today, he has sponsors,
fans and a reputation as one of the world’s top drone pilots.
“It’s just something so
different,” he says when I ask why drone racing has become so popular in such a
short time. “When I go flying out in the park and I’m just flying around,
people [see it and] go, ‘Oh, it’s a drone’. Their reaction would be no
different if it was a foam airplane or something like that.
“The moment I put the goggles
on them though, they go, ‘Wow!’ It’s the same reaction every single time. And
that’s the best way to explain it – why it’s taking off is because of that wow
factor. It’s like playing a video game, it’s like the pod racers in Star Wars; it’s that extra dimension
that we haven’t been able to access until now.”
Eliminating the lag time
between drone-mounted cameras and the vision in the pilot’s goggles has been
the game-changing improvement. Simon Jardine, head of drone consultancy company
Aerobot, has been flying drones longer than anyone in Australia. His company
provides advice and builds and modifies custom machines for the likes of the
military and Surf Life Saving Australia. “Right
now, technology is racing forward at such a pace, it’s hard to keep up,”
Jardine says. “We can fly further, [we can fly] behind obstacles, with zero
lag, so it’s instant: what you see is what you see.”
“You have to have zero
latency,” agrees Paul Dumais, referring to potential delays in video
transmission. Dumais is an aerospace engineer currently building a new
prototype for Aerobot. “They’ve gotta be able to send a signal via a video
transmitter wirelessly on a 5.8 gigahertz frequency, to his goggles, with zero
latency. Or as little as possible. Because if you’re doing 140 kilometres an
hour, a couple of milliseconds [out] – you’re hitting something.”
Jardine, Dumais and I are
talking in a park in Byron Bay. I’m handed the goggles and Jardine flies his
drone while I see what it sees. The speed and manoeuvrability of the stripped-back
machine is incredible; it’s easy to see how you’d come unstuck if the feedback
to the goggles was even a tiny bit out.
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| Nowak's Drone |
Drone racing and freestyle
has, in the past 12 months, become big business. The inaugural event Nowak won
was a relatively small affair, but since then the profile of this fledgling
sport has grown almost as fast as the accompanying technology. In March this
year, in Dubai, the World Drone Prix offered a US$1 million prize pool. This
year’s US nationals in August have partnered with American sports cable channel
ESPN. The World Drone Racing Championships will run in Hawaii in October. With
money and interest growing rapidly, inevitably so are the politics, as a number of organisations jostle for control of the sport.
“Unfortunately, [these
bodies] are all just sitting there arguing, and all the pilots want to do is
race,” Nowak says. “We’re going, would you guys stop fighting and just let us have
some fun?”
As a result, Nowak and a
handful of other top pilots have begun to distance themselves from the
organised racing aspect, preferring instead freestyle flying for its own
satisfaction. “It’s kinda the same as skateboarders, they go out there and they
make those videos,” he says, grinning. “You’ve got the rebels that just wanna
make the videos and lead the lifestyle, then you’ve got the guys who wanna go
to the competitions. I’m the guy that just wants to be the rebel and lead the
lifestyle.”
Nowak has just returned from the US where
he’s been filming episodes of Rotor Riot,
a YouTube-based series not unlike Top
Gear but with drones instead of cars. He and a handful of other pilots head
to different locations such as abandoned warehouses, woodlands and even
shooting ranges, and put their machines
through their paces. Everything is filmed and uploaded to an audience of 35,000
subscribers.
YouTube has proven an incredibly important
medium for these drone pilots – Nowak’s channel has 17,228 subscribers; American
pilot “Mr Steele” (Steele Davis) has 26,361; and “Charpu” (Carlos Puertolas), the “godfather of FPV”,
has 55,28. It was the popularity of his channel that had
Nowak invited to the first drone nationals and attracted his sponsors.
Drones today are more and
more common, being utilised for a variety of purposes from aerial filming to
shark spotting. For a number of years, hobbyists have been flying line-of-sight
drones – that is, kept in sight of the operator, without a camera and
goggles – including some piloted via an iPad.
These racing drones are
different. Their construction is stripped back to only what is necessary to maximise
speed and efficiency. The technology is dazzling. Dumais talks to me about 32-bit
boards, electronic speed controllers, and software like Baseflight, OneShot and
Cleanflight. Jardine is flying a Warpquad 6-inch on 25 volts – it weighs around
half a kilo, flies at a 55-degree forward angle, and can hit speeds of up to
140 kilometres an hour, with but a five-minute battery life. Of course, their
performance is only going to get better.
"In the very near future, perhaps before
the end of the decade, the FPV experience will be hyper-realistic,” says
Dumais. “Like you’re actually flying in the drone, but on acid. It’ll be the
combination of high-end computer gaming to provide insane virtual reality
tracks, superimposed over real physical terrain." The sky is the limit –
but only physically.
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