HACKER Q&A
📣 eimrine

How airshow drones don't crash each other?


I have a video of a typical drone airshow where hundreds of drones draw pictures with mind-blowing accuracy [1]. How is this possible? What sensors allow you to do this? Do the drones have the coordinates of their place in the swarm relative to their nearest neighbors? Do they receive coordinates individually?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz1w9EuIzEI

update: the goal of my question is to figure up about how precisely might be driving a single drone with possibility of a wind and with sometimes limited precision of GPS and with fundamentally limited inertial driving.

  👤 _benj Accepted Answer ✓
I don’t know… but my guess is that there must be a way for the to communicate with each other to avoid collision instead of GPS… from the time I flew drones, the computers inside them perform calculations and decisions thousands of times per second.

The part of the puzzle I have no clue about is the precise how… maybe hall sensors?

Or maybe, just maybe, the thing is actually a lot simpler and all they are doing is making a matrix display with drones and the drones just stay static and the appearance of movement is just on the LED display?

Again… just taking a wild guess because is fun to think how one would do it… but again, I don’t know :D