This year’s Super Bowl halftime show featured hundreds of swirling, swarming drones.
The best Super Bowl halftime shows leave indelible memories, be it a notorious wardrobe malfunction, that goofy Left Shark, or every last second of Beyoncé’s two appearances. It’s too soon to say whether anything Lady Gaga did tonight will resonate, but at least she offered something new: An army of dancing drones, ducking and dodging over the Houston skyline, transforming from stars to a fluttering flag.
It’s probably the first time you’ve seen 300 drones flying in formation, but it’s almost certainly not the last. The technology underpinning the Intel Shooting Star drone system is fascinating in and of itself, but its potential applications are even more so. The same drones that accompanied Lady Gaga will one day revolutionize search-and-rescue, agriculture, halftime shows, and more.
First, though, let’s focus on the fun stuff.
Drone Show
Performing for a global audience of about 160 million or so people represents this drone platform’s biggest stage, but Intel has done this before. The company’s Shooting Star drone squad recently finished a three-week run at Disney World, and last year 500 synchronized drones flew in Sydney, setting the highly specific world record for “most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously.”
Each drone is about a foot long square, weighs just over eight ounces, and sports a plastic and foam body to soften inadvertent impacts. They aren’t as flashy as consumer quadcopters, which is just as well, because you’re not supposed to notice them. Instead, you’re supposed to notice the four billion color combinations created by the onboard LEDs, and the aerial acrobatics choreographed with meticulous coding.
Each drone communicates wirelessly with a central computer to execute its dance routine, oblivious to what the hundreds of machines around it are doing. The system can adapt on the, er, fly, too. Just before showtime, the computer checks the battery level and GPS signal strength of each drone, and assigns roles accordingly. Should a drone falter during the show, a reserve unit takes over within seconds.
All of which is pretty cool in its own right. But making it work for the biggest television event of the year takes a whole different level of planning.
Red Zones and Red Tape
Student of Super Bowl security measures and FAA regulations may by this point have some questions. The government strictly forbids drones within 34.5 miles of Houston’s NRG Stadium, after all, and the FAA limits on how high drones can fly in any circumstance, let alone above 80,000 or so people. How on earth did Intel get away with it?
The short answer is, it taped the show earlier this week.
Source: Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl LI Halftime Show Drones Have a Bright Future | WIRED
