Off to the Drone Races

your body a whole lot. My favorite kind the less moving of my body, the happier, the more competitive I can think. Actually, I am a champion at not moving table hockey that you're pretty good at table I'm pretty good at I'm actually pretty good at table tennis. Yeah, I'm pretty good at that. If I weren't a very small girl, I would be really good at those like Ninja Warrior course things. Yeah. We actually you have you been to the course here in Atlanta. I'm like a

little spider. I can go right up those walls. Yeah. Yeah, it's kinda we have a we have a a Ninja Ninja Warrior style um training ground here in Atlanta. Playground like adult playground, yeah, kind of like kind of like

one of those adult sized obstacle course type deals. So in the past week, we've talked about how different, you know, advancing technologies can change sports that exist today, like making them safer, maybe having a football technology that would make it less likely for you to get gravely injured, or even technologies that could boost human capabilities, which bring in the question of fairness and what is human achievement in that kind of world. Replace my bones with with adamantium.

So that's not what we're gonna look at today. Now, we're going to look at things that have not been considered as sports in the past, but are on the verge of becoming perhaps even a major sport in the future. So um, an example of this in the past might be just the standard robot battles, right, something that definitely got some coverage. Uh, there are several TV shows that were all about robot wars, and some of them were

more about pitting various builders against each other. Some of them were let's put your robot against the house robots and this sort of, uh, this obstacle course and see if you can get through that kind of thing. We're looking at sort of an extension of that today. We're specifically going to look at drone races, but before we do that, let's at least talk about some of the other stuff we've we've covered in the Realm of drones because we mentioned it once or twice, yes, previously on

the podcast, we talked about delivery drones. In December, it's called droning. On other related listening, Jonathan and I did a tech Stuff episode that was the history of drones and the modern day commercial and military implications of the technology. It was a pretty full episode. That one came out in October and is called The Big Deal About Drones. So if you would like a review of drone technology

and stuff, then then go check those episodes out. And we're specifically talking about drones that are under human control today, right, we're not talking about autonomous drones that team's program to go through an obstacle course. This is a human pilot that is depending on the type, it may even be more than one human pilot, although the all the ones I was looking at was a single person controlling the in real time, controlling a drone through of course exactly.

So that kind of leads us to what is drone racing. Typically it does involve a pilot trying to get the best time when navigating a flying drone through a complicated course as quickly as they possibly can. They may have to race against other pilots at the same time, so it's not always just a time trial like you know, see if you can run this distance the fastest kind of thing. Sometimes it's a race race where you can have collisions and stuff that will impact you'll make it

more fun. Yeah, well, the banana peels are air banana peels. That red shell or maybe it's the blue shells. The blue shells, the one that's the seeking one that goes after the person in first place at any rate, that's correct. Yeah, my Nintendo knowledge is that hasn't completely left me. So it's it is. Uh. It is one of those things where it makes it more exciting, both for the pilots and for spectators. Right, the possibility that that two pilots

are gonna have to duke it out. There could be a collision that could that could change the course of the race, not the physical course, but the outcome. Depending upon the style of the race, pilots may all be

required to use the same equipment. This is not the case in all of them, but there are somewhere in order to really test the skills of the pilot, everyone has to use the exact same style of drone, and in that way, it's incredibly similar to something like NASCAR, where the rules governing how your car can be designed are so strict that there can be pages of rules on something just as simple as tires, like they want to make sure that a person's win or loss is

more due to their capability as a driver as opposed to the superiority of the machine they are in, which is funny because if you go back and you watch all those old movies where people are drag racing, it seems like they're always talking about the car. They're comparing their cars. My car is better than your car. Oh yeah, well, I'll see you on the drag racing strip. Well, drag racing is a little different from NASCAR racing, but I see what you're saying. Yeah, there are actual drone races

that are similar to those drag races. I mean, I doubt they're racing for pink slips, but they actually allow you to build and modify your own drone and race it against other people's drones, so you might be using very different UH layouts, designs, perhaps different motors um and so therefore it really comes down to not just the skill of the pilot but also the capabilities of the machine itself, so you have both kinds. It just depends

upon what the race rules state is allowed. Like if it's one where everyone gets the same sort of stuff, you don't bring your own drone there. You are issued one UH usually one per race. As it turns out, um an agility is really important in these right because you're you're often are flying the drone under, over or through obstacles. Because you're flying a drone, the race course can be three dimensional. It's not just a you know, out and back or a loop around. It might involve

having to increase your elevation or decrease it. It may involve going through an area where you can't physically see where the drone is. In those races, typically they are first person view or FPV races, you rely upon a

video feed from the drone itself. The pilot does right, Yes, yes, the spectators just watch what's going on, but the pilot would be relying upon a camera mounted on the drone, and the pilot would be wearing a headset that would get the video feed from his or her drone and from their perspective, it would be like sitting in the cockpit of of a jet or some other flying device,

and that you would be flying through the course. So you have to be able to recognize obstacles and make decisions very very quickly in that case as part of the skill. Uh. And it's incredible if you watch videos from the various FPV style races and you get to see what the pilots see. I can't. My brain does not work that fast. My my fingers definitely couldn't react fast enough. I would be the guy ramming the drone into the side of the wall over and over again

until it finally couldn't fly anymore. Sure, I mean, but but think about think about the first time that you saw someone else playing like Castle Wolfenstein, and how I mean, did did you have the same reaction? I know I did. Like I was, I was like, it is physically impossible for me to control a video game that does that thing. And now I'm like, I'm old enough that I was the first person to see that I saw play Castle Wolfenstein.

But I get what you're saying. Because I've definitely seen people who are far better that I than I am at various twitch based type of gaming, and and it is it's like there are different species. I mean, it's I can't even begin to imagine the amount of time dedicated to that, to to develop that sort of skill. Um. So, the that's a specific type of drone racing. Not all drone racing is first person view racing, but a lot

of it is, especially today. Um And some organizations, like the Drone Racing League have even gone so far as to set up specific rules and points systems to award pilots and give them a score at the end of each race, to allow for a kind of a league based competition, right, so that you can have various types of uh, you know, qualifying rounds and semifinals, that sort of stuff. And we'll talk more about that's a little bit later, but first let's talk about some of the

the earliest drone races out there. And when we say early, it's not like this dates that far back. The drone racing scene is pretty young. Yeah, because because the commercialization of drones is pretty young. Yeah, I remember seeing I think the first one I ever saw it was maybe two thousand seven or two thousand eight, and it was a parrot drone at CS and I was really impressed

by it. But since then we've really seen it get uh embraced by a hobbyist market and then start to blossom out where it's no longer just a a bleeding edge kind of thing like the early adopters have had their hands on it for a while. Now we're starting to see a lot more people get interested in this particular type of technology. So let's talk about the first national drone racing competition in the United States. Well, this

was actually held just last summer. The very first national one was held in Sacramento at the California State Fair on July uh and it was that it was the very first national drone racing competition and the races took place on a soccer field. The prize money for winners to dollars, so there isn't some funds for this. People

are interested and they had lots of sponsors. I went to their website as tons of logos and corporate insignias, and I'm sure the hydro logo was in there somewhere probably, And you can watch some of these races in video forum online. The races that I saw attended to be sort of what we were talking about earlier, the twisting tracks with obstacles, kind of like a Mario Kart track. Actually, um and there were a hundred and twenty pilots going

into the competition. According to some news reports, they had to put netting up around the soccer field to reduce the risk of a runaway drone maiming a spectator, right, yeah. Typically, Uh, one of the things you can get on a drone are the little the propeller guards. It's a circle that protects from that sort of thing. But obviously, if you're racing, you might want to reduce any weight on your so you're like, let's get rid of those and turn this

into a face slicing machine. Measures off. Yeah, so that's when you want to have these, uh, these sort of barriers up just in the case that either maybe a radio signals lost. It might not even be the fault of the pilot, right It could be a technical failure that would cause a problem, or it could be especially if it's a first person view race that the pilot has misidentified where the next marker for the course happens

to be right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that if you have taken the safety measures off, you also do not take faces off. And so the winner of the competition was actually an Australian, which I thought was funny because it was the first U S national championship and yet it had international participation. So the winner was Chad and no whack of Brisbane, Australia and uh, and they're gonna they're gonna hold another one this year. I believe it's

going to be in New York, right yeah, uh. And so I was reading a few articles about this and there was one I came across that was really cool. It was a CBS News article and they talked to one of the competitors from the competition named Zoe Stumbog, and she she gave some quotes that I thought were interesting. I want to know what y'all think about this. So she used to be in into motorcycles, and she said, yeah, motorcycles were my thing. It was everything to me, like

being able to ride. It gave me this whole experience of being outside my body into the world and living. I really couldn't live without it. But then she had a medical issue that restricted her to bed for a long time, a period of months, and it prevented her from riding motorcycles anymore. And so she reported that she got very depressed for a while until one day she went to a hobby shop and discovered a little micro quad copter and she immediately fell in love with it.

And she has been doing drone racing. So you can actually go to her YouTube channel and check it out. I want to talk about a couple of those videos in a minute, but she went on to say that, um that she said quote, once I put the camera on it, you start doing the first person view, and it really was like riding around on a motorcycle. You were living in the world around you and no longer in a bed sitting down feeling hurt, depressed or whatever,

and nothing else mattered when you had the goggles on. Uh. And I don't know, I thought that was interesting, Like I thought of drone racing as a kind of like, uh, kind of like a video game, like sitting back and passive.

But I I guess that's probably not the case. Really, I I can totally get what she's saying because I think back to when I was a kid and I used to ride my bike a lot, and I lived on a really you know, it wasn't a super steep hill, but it was a very tall hill, and once you started getting up to speed, like you sort of do have almost an out of body experience like it. It's the closest you feel that you're going to get to flying, short of being on a hang glider or or jumping

out of a plane or something like that. And uh, and we've talked before about virtual reality experiences that are so immersive as to make you feel as if you're actually in the environment that's being simulated. Right, I hesitate to call drone racing type of virtual reality. It often uses the same equipment virtual reality uses. But because the actual environment is not virtual, and I get really picky about such things, I don't call it there. It's not

virtual reality. It's remote reality. Yes, I would agree entirely with that that um that moniker. I would say it's remote reality, and but it's it still has that feeling of immersion. In fact, people say, like when you wear those FPV glasses and you're piloting, it feels like you're in one of those I would not be surprised to see video of pilots working these and watching them kind of duck the heads as they crash. I'm sure you flinch. Yeah, absolutely,

yeah I can. I can just because I just think about like passive experiences, like watching a movie and occasionally kind of leaning whenever you know, like you're really into the film and there's maybe like a race sequence or yeah, same sort of thing, except you're in control, which gives that immersion feeling a much greater sense in the person. Right, you feel more immersed because you what you do matters, right, Yeah. So and and I even got some of the sense

just from watching some of these videos. I mentioned that Zoe Stumball has a YouTube channel and it's called Zoe Full Throttle. I went and checked it out. Uh, And there's some great nerdy in jokes in some of the videos, but a lot of it's just it's just first person video of the drones point of view as it's flying around, and you can really get into it. I watched one that was set to the Legend of Zelda theme music.

But then there was another really cool one that was a first person view of a drone flight zooming in between tall trees in this forest like setting, and it was set to Star Wars music, and then I was like, oh, I get it, Oh, I get it. They're recreating the view of the speeder bike race from Return of the Jedi in the forest Moon of Indoor, when there's zooming around in between the trees, and it works pretty well. I was watching this video and I was like, oh, man,

I'm there. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty awesome. And so the opportunity to use drones in that kind of entertaining way, um, you know, we we've seen some interesting applications of that already, but then incorporating that into the race experience, you can see how this could really lead to some potentially amazing

immersive forms of entertainment. Well yeah, I mean one of the things I was reading about and thinking about was the idea of spectators of drone races not just watching the drones all zoom around, right, having on their own FPV goggles on. Theyre not controlling the drones, but if you know, you pick your drone and you see from

its point of view. Yeah, especially if we got some some some fancier equipment in there's some three six degree cameras, some VR goggles involved, Like that sounds a really motion sick potentially, but but be like so much fun. What's a good race without a little bit of vomiting? That's what I always say. It takes me back, so Uh.

The interesting thing is we when we went into the research for this knowing that this is a relatively young sport, right, a young activity that hobbyists have been doing for a few years. But we're starting to see ramp up into something that's that's getting more um mainstream media attention. Over the last maybe six months or so. We had a question in our notes, just are there any official organizations for drone racing? Boy? Howdy? Are there? There are so

many that you know. Part of that is because it's so young that they're probably gonna be one or two that ultimately draw the most membership, But there are a lot that are out there. Some of them are very regionally based, so there may be an official local chapter

of some of these in your area. UM, if you're in the United States, one place to go check is the u s d R, a site that stands for US Drone Racing Association and its mission is to help bring the new sport of remote controlled multi rotor fpv U a vs into the mainstream they're not going to do it like that. Yeah. I was just about to say, here's a hint, guys, let's cut down some of the track and yeah, yeah, you a V. If you've never heard that term before, is is unmanned aerial vehicle. Yeah. Yeah.

So as part of that, their association works to create guidelines for races so that they can make sure that any competitions that are set up are fair, that they have appropriate safety considerations in place, that sort of stuff in order to allow this this activity to thrive. Like what that's what that organization is dedicated to. They don't want to see, uh, someone put together a shoddy event and then it ends up hurting the blossoming sport as

a result. They also provide resources to people who are interested in finding groups that race drones. So if you're in the United States, it's a great resource. The Drone Racing League is another organization. It's a it's a relatively young one, relatively new one. Uh. They announced their first competitive season just back in January, so they have not been around for very long at all. Yeah, it's April.

We're recording this. Yeah, so they hope to combine video from from the drones themselves and from the third person perspective videos which are actually often captured by other drones that are carrying like four K cameras. So you've got the drones that are that the pilots are using, they have an HD camera mounted on them, and you've got the drones that are just flying around the course that can get you know, good shot of the racers zooming

by them, um like you do in sports. That's a pretty common method for getting footage in in UH football and stuff like. Sure. Yeah, And what's interesting to me is that the HD video that these drones are capturing, that's not the video that's going back to the goggles that the pilots are wearing them. The reason for that

is HD takes up a lot of bandwidth. Yeah yeah, and then that would be a communication problem with then a single space, especially if you've got more than one drone going at the same time, right, and even if they're all working on different channels, it's just such a huge demand to be able to transmit that amount of information that quickly. What would tend to happen is you would have some latency or lag, and that means that the pilots would not be able to control the vehicle

very well. If you've ever played a video game that had really bad latency issues, you know what I'm talking about. Where you know, you see the jump coming up, and you press the button when your character is at the appropriate spot, but your character just keeps running and then runs off the edge of the cliff because the game was several steps ahead of where you were seeing it, and you can see is your character falls to its untimely death. It's like a kind of flirp in the

air when the jump button finally goes through. Now, imagine that that happens to you. When you're controlling a drone moving at more than a hundred miles per hour and there's a narrow hallway coming up that you have to maneuver into. You're pretty much gonna end up with a bunch of drone pieces on the ground because you cannot physically move anticipated at the right time. The lag will totally mess you up. Plus, I don't know if you guys have ever experienced latency in a VR headset, that's

a one way ticket. The Pukeville as gonna get you sicker than a dog so quickly because latency that that's what gives you that that swimmy feeling that things are not quite right. And if if you're going on a miles per hour and things are not quite right, that's you're you're gonna get sick pretty quickly. You know. I just now had a thought that the next thing after drone race, it's going to be drone demolition derby. Isn't it already exists? Well, wait just a bit and i'll

tell you about combat. Yeah, oh no, no you're not. That's in our notes. When they get there, i'll tell you. So it's not long though, you don't have to wait very long. Um. So, the speed's involved in the races that dr L is putting on are are pretty intense. According to dr L, they can be up to around a hundred twenty miles per hour orde kilometers per hour.

That's incredibly fast. And keep in mind the pilots are seeing this from a first person perspective, and some of the courses include lots of tight turns and uh, you know, ducking down areas where you know you can see where you have to go, but you can't see past where you like. It goes around a corner where you're not gonna be able to see until you get around the corner. And the pilots have never flown the courses before during these competitions, so it gets pretty. It relies on a

lot of skill and agility. It also relies on all out of technological ability at the DRL actually, in order to cope with getting this live video feed at those speeds back to the pilots and have them be able to respond in time, the LEAK designs its own radio communication systems both into the drones and into the architecture of every event space, and they set up right so the pilots are seeing kind of a standard definition video. It's not that same HD feed that you get in

the finished product. In fact, d r l A said they plan on having these events happen and then cutting together a video to show what happened in the race, so that spectators can watch the video because I don't know, you know, if you've ever seen video of one of these events from outside the first person view perspective, very quickly it becomes boring. You're not looking at anything because the drones will zoom pass, they'll get out of your field of view, and then you're just kind of waiting

for another zoom. Yeah, and that'll that that's not satisfying. In fact, that's one of the reasons why some of the other organ thozations have come up with stuff like the demolition derby approach, because that's something that a crowd can experience in person and enjoy as opposed to a race where you have that moment we're like, wow, those things are going fast and they're gone now, So I guess, I guess I'll find out who won later. Spectator of

F zero. Yeah. Yeah, unless you're somehow magically able to travel along like having that first person's view experience, I mean, I don't know with it with us. I've been to a couple of car races before on very curvy courses where like, like I was sitting by a hairpin turn and and there were multiple different kinds of cars. It

wasn't like a standardized race. There were different cars that were coming by, and A they were so loud, and B it was this hairpin turn, and every single car that came by, I was convinced that it was going to crash and everyone was going to die and it was gonna be the most upsetting thing. So I was entertained by that for a good while. I was about say, like, yeah, that sounds like a fun day, but it's very tense, like car racing. You probably probably slept really well that night.

Like I was so tired from being tense. I just wanted to say, but but yes, I could see how that would get very dull very quickly with drones. Yeah. So one of the cool things that dr L plans on doing is using lots of different locations for their races, including things like arenas where drones will race not just

around the arena, but down these hallways. So like the entrance way you would have to walk through to get to the arena from the lobby, drones may have to duck down that same hallway, go through a backstage area essentially before coming back out through the arena area. UM, and they'll have to fly through various boxes that are all lit up that are the indicate markers that you know that that's kind of like flags in a slalomn

course you have to go through to to qualify. UM. But they'll also look at using things like abandoned buildings. Apparently there's an abandoned mall in Los Angeles that's one of their courses. And also they're playing on using some landmarks as potential race courses as well. I don't know how they get the uh clearance to do that necessarily, but that's that's in their plans as well, right up the nose of Mount Rushmore, that's right. Uh. And the d r OL is one of the companies that provides

the drones to the pilots. It brings I've heard like about a hundred to each event, just in case there's like that many crashes and they need to just send another one out. The pilots, by the way, are paid by the league, um, though perhaps not very much because I've heard that most of the pilots have full time jobs when they're not running around at the events. Yeah.

I imagine that because this is so early in the life of DRL that perhaps what they're hoping for is for it to to rise to a level where pilots could be paid a living wage just from professionally competing in these in these kind of races. Yeah, I think that's absolutely their goal. Uh. Their method is to score pilots based off of passing certain checkpoints. They get fifty

points for two checkpoints per race. UM and also that you get ten points for every second you finished the race under a two minute cap, so that's kind of cool. And and then that race determined are that all of those points together determines your score for that heat of

a race, and races consist of three heats UM. Each heat involves a new drone for each racer, so that way you don't have to worry about the fact that if you've just raced that you know the drone you're using now has got a lower battery, so each one is supposed to be fully charged and up to spec, all identical to one another UM. So a pilot score is the sum of his or her performance across all the heats UH and there are also multiple rounds per season,

so the qualifying round will see twelve pilots compete. After the heats are finished, all the points are tallied and the eight best UH scores will go on to the semifinals. After that, you have another series of three heats for a race. The top points top four pilots go on to the finals, and then the the one who has the best score of all after another three heats is named that champion. And apparently apparently this points is them is the way that NASCAR does it essentially. Yeah, yeah,

that's what I understand too. I've never actually looked into NASCAR, but as I understand that's that's the way they judge it as well. Also, like NASCAR, the league hopes to eventually attract pilot sponsorships the same way that drivers are sponsored in in NASCAR and other racing sports. You have like the slim Gym drones. Yeah, the Tide drone exactly. And uh, and that's part of why they're so focused on creating these these visually dynamic videos of the races

that will appeal to audiences. Um. Those videos, meanwhile, I've heard, are based on the aesthetic of video games, like the sorts of things where you've got a frozen level and in a desert level, a tropical level, like an urban level. And and they've said that that's what they've had in

mind when they've been designing their courses. Uh. I mean, honestly, like the the League as a company sounds just savvy as all get out to If they're able to partner with someone like Nintendo and make a rainbow road course game over against that's that's that's going to get a huge nostalgia uh rabid fan base to to say, like, I want to compete in that league. Uh, there's also other ones, though the Aerial Sports League is the one, and this is what we're gonna get to the combat

stuff in just a second. Arial Sports League was founded in two thousand eleven. It was actually a group of hobbyists in the Bay Area, including people who were working with the MythBusters and um and and folks who worked with like the robot battles in the area. And Grant Amahara, if you didn't know, was very active in that he

was a designer for robots for robot battles. So they would meet every Friday, and when drones came out, the early adopters grabbed drones, and then before too long they said, hey, how about we start fighting our drones, and they began to do that, and then they started to design drones that were better suited for a combat, meaning that it was easier to repair them after after they had collided with each other twenty feet in the air and crash

to the ground. UM. So they also hold races similar to dr L, but they aren't as um as elaborate in scale. Uh so they don't do like the giant arena thing with like the smoke and the lasers and all that kind of stuff that DRL does. There's are more like on soccer fields with a little obstacle course and the racers are using the f PV goggles, but the spectators tend to just be watching, right, and they point out, they said, that's not very interesting for spectators.

So we understand that as a business this is not really viable because it only caters to the people who are actually competing, not to a larger fan base, which is why they introduced combat. So there's also these are these are distinct from the racing games. They're not combined, so it's not like you're racing and then you're trying to nudge the other pilot off the course or no, uh, it's not like that. Is that what that was? That game?

It's a motorcycle racing game where you hit people with chains and then a bat I think at one point, yeah, like death proof or something. Yeah, it's not not Yeah, there's none of that is going on. But they do have the combat events, and these are usually they take place in a large, uh netted in arena, so that way no uh, no piece will fly out and hurt somebody who's watching. UM. But these are easier for respectators

to watch and appreciate. And typically a match consists of either an objective oriented game like you either pick up an object or maybe you already have one attached to certain uh drones within the playing area, and then you have to move through a course or you have to move through like a hoop. The one I saw it almost looked like there was a pom pom attached to the bottom of a drone and it kept the pilot kept clearly trying to move it through a hoop, while

other drones just slammed into it from all directions. I never saw one successfully navigate through a hoop. I saw a lot of close calls ending and crashes, or you might just have a straight up bash them up between two or more opponents. So like the Royal Rumble equivalent of drone combat uh and really that's it's the old thunder dome philosophy. Two drones enter, one drone leaves, and one drone doesn't always leave. Now sometimes sometimes to drones

enter and nobody goes home, or they go home in pieces. UM. The basic drone used in these tends to be the game of drones. Heroro Sports airframe. This is what was developed by that that group of hobbyists, uh that they call essentially indestructible. It's a very resilient airframe design, and it's a kit that pilots can then build and even modify, so it's it's not like everyone is forced to use exactly the same thing. Um And they are for sale. You can buy one of these kids. They are not cheap.

I think they're around for four hundred and four d thirty dollars something like that. I'm pretty expensive. I mean it's a uh they're they're supposed to be pretty high end. So they say it's a great starter for anyone who wants to get into the drone combat stuff. Um And there are a lot of other organizations, tons of them, way too many to name. Uh. Two that I just ran across quickly before I saw that there were so many that I thought there's just no way I can

do all these. One was F one f PV Racing League, which is in Raleigh, North Carolina. Might be the closest one to us. There might be one in Atlanta. I didn't see or the drone Racing network that's called q A R O P and I don't know how to pronounce that because there's no U after the q uh. And there are ton more, but these largely grew out of hobbyist groups similar to the one I was just

talking about, So lots of different options. Uh, if you are interested in this sort of stuff, you can easily use the Googles and search for groups that are remotely close to you remote because yeah, you do them. Let's talk about some big drone races, all right, So you might be thinking, all right, so there are these groups. Uh, there's the championship that we talked about earlier, the the first national Championship race. Are there any other big ones planned?

And yes, there are lots. Well, like we mentioned, the next National drone Racing competition is going to take play or the next Championship is going to take place in sixteen Governors Island, New York City, right, Yeah, and it's going to be streamed live on ESPN three, which is one of their online channels, and will also be edited down into an hour long broadcast on ESPN Proper, which which is which is a pretty huge first step for for this as a sport. It could it could be

the next Texas Holding poker. Sure, I mean, you know, I guess, depending you know, like like pending on whether anyone actually watches it or not. But but in a press release, ESPN said drone racing is poised to become the next behemoth racing sport alongside NASCAR in Formula one. Uh And whether that's hopeful marketing or an earnest prediction,

it's hard to tell. But I mean, but they're putting but they're putting money and effort into this, right, And it's not like it's the cho right sure, just what dodgeball supposedly esp ao. Um. But yeah, there's also other championships. There's I mean, you're thinking national championships sound great, but what if I want to be king of the world. Well, there's also the World Drone Racing Championships organized by Rotor Sports.

Those are the same folks who did the National Drone Racing Championships in California back in and that's going to take place over the course of a week in October two thousand sixteen in kuwa Iowa Ranch, hawahite E, which I have been to and it is lovely. I bet ESPN three will be streaming this one live as well. Awesome, and there's some pretty serious money. I mean, it's a big jump from the dollar and prizes that the National

Championship had in twenty fIF team. There's gonna be a total across all races, you know, combined two hundred thousand dollar amount of prizes, so that's amazing. They have lots of different styles of of races and competitions that will

be involved in this event over the course of the week. Um, there are different classes of drones that will be raced, and they the way they define the classes of drones is by airframe size, So there's a class kind of kind of Yeah, there's a two fifty class that refers to the distance between the diagonal of two different motors, and it cannot be greater than two d fifty millimeters. So if it's in that range of two or fifty millimeters, but bigger than a hundred eighty because otherwise you go

down to the micro class. Um, then you could race in this class of of drone vehicle. H. Then they also have other ones like a one thousand millimeter air frame class so significantly larger. Uh. They also have a fixed wing class. It's so I've not seen what those are, and there's not a lot of detail about what that race is going to entail yet. In fact, they on the website they say details will be uh coming out later.

But there's apparently one where you're going to be quote unquote surfing a cliff uh in Hawaii using these fixed wings, And I'm wondering what that specifically means, but it sounds pretty awesome. Um, surfing a cliff, Yeah, I don't get it. I don't either. I'm wondering if it means that you have to go down the face of the cliff and then pull up, I don't know, or it maybe that you're using the updraft coming from the cliff to maintain

a certain space and do some freestyle tricks. I don't know, because there aren't the details for that one yet, but it does sound really interesting. So if you want to compete in these World Championships, well, you're gonna need to earn your spot. You gotta pay your dues, and the way you could do that is to win one of the associated races is in the thirty participating countries, So there are qualifying races that are happening around the world, and if you win a qualifier, then you can go

on to race in this championship. Or if you have not had the time to race in one of those events around the world, you could go to Hawaii and enter the Aloha Cup and that is going to be a race that will the results of which will end up picking ten qualifiers to be part of the championship race. Um, but you will not be able to join any countries team. You'll essentially be ah independent lone wolf. So you can't be like, I'm on Team America because you didn't win

one of the American races, you won the Aloha Cup. Uh. But I love that. That's that's still giving people the

opportunity to race in the World Championship. Yeah. There's also a World Drone pre the The inaugural one just happened in Dubai in March and it boasted a prize pool of over a million dollars because Dubai, there were like a hundred and fifty teams competing and more than two thousand spectators on the site and it was it was one that the competition was won by a British team led by fifteen year old Luke Banister, Uh, yeah, I was not. And then the prize, the first prize was

two thousand dollars, so so good job, Luke Banister. Yeah, I bet your team was really happy. Yes, wow, two ars. This is just making me think of we finally reached the world I was promised when I saw the Fred Savage Masterpiece of the Wizard. Except instead of video games, we're talking about drone racing. And we don't have to wear the ninto, no power glove, and and high school aged kids can be out there doing this thing. That's amazing.

You know, you don't have to wear the power glove to pilot a drone, but you might have to wear a funny looking hat. What what you're talking about, Joe? I want to introduce another type of drone racing that's taken place, which is drone racing via mind control pilot. What yeah, surely not? Yeah they did it, you know why not? Okay? Yeah? So what you know? What if piloting a drone with your hands is just not enough, so we're going to introduce the element of simulated telepathy.

We've talked about brain computer interfaces on the show before. BC. I s there are lots of ways you can do this, but essentially the idea is you want to interface directly between your brain and a computer without having to use your hands or your eyes or something like that. So no keyboard, no mouse, no screen. You just got something either on your head or in your head that that relays commands or feedback to and from a computer. And

in this case, it's an on your head situation. I am not aware of a situation in which they implanted something in the skull, but I'm going to suggest that they should. So. In April of the University of Florida hosted what appears to be the world's first brain controlled drone race. Yeah, Alma matern doing stuff other than getting

its students tas it doesn't involve electrical impulse. Yeah. So the drones were trained to interface with pilots neural activity through an e G. And that that's electro and cephalography, and it means putting electrodes on the outside of your scalp to since brain activity through the skull and the skin. The drones in question were d j I Phantom drones.

It's pretty much a standard in the industry. Yeah, and there were sixteen pilots the race was you will someone please read off the full course length ten yards ten yards race and about the measurement, right they were They weren't racing across ten people's yards. It was like, yeah, and so this is probably you can chalk this up to the the e G method. So this works the same way a lot of e G experiments work. Meaning you can't just put on an e G cap and say, okay,

drone go. It doesn't know how to go. It doesn't know what that means when you think that. So instead, what you have to do is train the computer to look for certain types of neural activity. Right. So that way, uh, it recognizes that when you are are when that neural activity is a certain thing, it indicates a certain action exactly. So here here's an example. So you put on this e G cap, you put some electrodes on your scalp, and then you practice thinking about a particular motion, like

pushing something forward. You concentrate real hard on pushing something forward, and then that mental activity gets recorded by the computer and then it's sort of average profile is mapped onto controller elements for the drone. Yeah, so so you tell the computer when I think this, I want you to move forward when this brain pattern happens right exactly, and so the signal produced when you think really hard about pushing forward gets correlated to maybe like a forward stick motion.

And since the e G has to go through the skull and the skin, you might guess that it's a lot less sensitive than some other types of BC eyes. And this is reflected if you go and watch the videos of the University of Florida released from this event. Actually I don't know if it was released by the university itself, that somebody put out some videos of this event. And the drones were they were moving, they really were moving.

People had the electrodes on, they were thinking, thinking into their computers, they're going, and the drones were just kind of like inching forward barely. I bet you can chalk this up to the lack of sensitivity of e G because e G is a very comparatively strong way to sense neural activity. If you could instead implant some microelectro to rays directly into your motor cortex, then I bet

you could really make that drone go. I wonder if you could sabotage a race just by playing Dave Matthews crash into me you just see all them, making people imagine they're just all the all the drones just end

up colliding with one another. Also, and unless you trained it to crash when you did, that's a college crowd too, so that they'd ultimately I mean, granted it's different college crowd than when I went to college, but if if you had played that at U g A back when I was there, they went, well, at least we've got Dave Matthews, I guess. So, I mean that's what the college kids like. Huh, that was that was what it

seemed like pent of my classmates liked. It wasn't what I liked, but well anyway, so so yeah, brain controlled drone raceist that's the future. Obviously, using hands is so old. So with this, this uh, this form of entertainment, this form of of competition gaining in popularity, I mean pretty

pretty quickly. Like this was something that I remembered seeing some videos of concepts for drone races in the past, but it seems like it went from concept to execution remarkably quickly, especially to the point where major outlets like ESPN are taking notice. We then need to think, how do we get people involved in the sport, maybe not just as a spectator, but also perhaps even as a pilot. Uh. And there are a lot of different opportunities out there, Uh,

not all of them requiring you to have cable. Yeah, there's a few companies that are starting to offer racing drone kits specifically for for racings. Uh. It's largely right now through crowdfunding campaigns. But if they're successful, I could I could totally see them turning into like long term businesses. A lot of them, stressed the d I Y asked backed pretty heavily with the consumer providing the construction of

the drone, but some others are fully assembled. Prices seem to range from the like three hundred nine hundred dollar sort of thing, um, depending on whether you do most of the assembly work yourself, and whether accessories like the

f PV goggles come along with the package. Right. So, uh, if you're doing the f PV racing in particular, I mean that that makes sense that the expense is going to be a little higher than you're just than your average quad copter that you could go out and buy at the hobby store, right exactly, because you know, I mean, you could do a drone race where you just have visual contact with the drone the entire time, but that doesn't have the same level of of complexity, and you

can't do things like the crazy obstacles as easily because once you know, once the drone gets a distance away, you can't judge, oh, do I need to go further up in order to get through that hoop? It's too hard, right, So the FPV really is what and plus just it

makes the whole experience more exciting. So if you're really interested in this, there are lots of hobbyist groups out there, many of what you can find through the various organizations we mentioned earlier, and a lot of them hold events that allow people to fly a drone and even fly a drone with that FPV headset on and get some stick time is what they call it um uh and the actual control time where you are in control of the drone and you can see what the pilots see.

You know, you were wearing the headset. The the event provides the drone typically, and so you would just go and there'd be like uh, Like there're several where they have an experience where you can go, you get in line when it's your turn, you put on the headset, you get the controller, and then you get to fly

the drone around. And some of them even have like timed courses where you can try and set the best time of the day and it's an open challenge, and after you're done, you can go and get back in line and try and beat your time and make sure that you're the one who wins at the end of the day. Just kind of cool. The idea that this is a way to get people involved and interested and find out if this is something that they would like

to spend money and time on and and join that community. Yeah, And I mean, and it's a fun it's a fun sport or experience or hobby, but it's also a terrific way to get people interested in mechanics and engineering, programming and all kinds of other important stem or steam now the kinds of areas. Yeah, the first time I saw Steam,

I thought it was a type of totally Yeah. And the the a is for arts, yeah, yeah, which is great because I mean I would argue that arts are just as important as those other pieces too, But I mean, especially like like design, Like I mean, design is kind of a pretty important part of engineering, but yeah, that's ah, so that's sort of our overview of drone races now.

When we were first putting this together, I was initially thinking, oh, we can also mention other emerging sports things that have been around longer than drone races but are starting to finally get some traction in the United States, like a E sports or video professional video game competitions, But that would require an entire episode all on its own, and of course we would have to go into how other nations like like South Korea in particular, are well ahead

of the curve on that kind of thing, and maybe we'll do a full episode about that in the future as well. But I think we need to devote an episode to Cyborg p Fowl writing. I think I really think it's interesting and part of the reason why I would love to do a professional video game episode like

the Future of Sports Part two or whatever. Yeah, E Sports, I would like to kind of do one, just to have the discussion about why do you think drone racing is getting a lot more mainstream media attention very early on compared to what E sports have had experienced in the United States, And I think it's largely because it involves a physical thing moving through physical space, and for some reason, mainstream media values that higher than moving a

virtual object through virtual space, even if the skill set is remarkably the same. I wonder if it also has to do with the perception that the competitors are less freaky or creepy. It's it's entirely possible. It's it's well, yeah, the stereotypical idea of oh, you're you're good at video games, you must be terrible at social interaction or anything else. Yeah, everything else you're bad at. You're only good at video games. We would like to break that stereotype every every day

we work at that thing. Yeah, so this was a fun thing to look into. Again, we didn't realize how big a deal it was until we started to really do the research. And now I totally want to have that experience. I know that I would never be at any sort of competitive level, but I would love to have the experience of flying one of these drones with at fpv uh headset on. I think it would be really cool. And if any of you out there have had experience with this, I would love to hear your thoughts, like,

what was it like? Let us know, because I really want to hear about it. Uh. You can get in touch with us with the email address f w Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. At Twitter we are FW Thinking. If you search for FW thinking on Facebook, our profile will pop up. You can leave us a message there

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