New sport for those who love drones

The Dreamer mind Magazine

  

Technology

Drone Racing: The next big thing

Nowadays we know drones, this are little flying four propeller artifacts that we can use to record from the sky using cameras that we attach to them. Today drones are everywhere; these objects are being used to solve many different problems that people usually have, not only recording from the skies.


Drones are used for Airshows, Land Mapping, Aerial Photography and Cinematography, Racing, Agriculture, Search, and Rescue, are being used for wildlife monitoring, Mail and Parcel Delivery, advertising, for example helping real estate agents, Medicine Deliveries, and much other stuff.

Today we going to talk about Drone Racing, this type of race will blow your mind, believe me. Pilots use small and super fast quad-copters to race through a very challenging flying circuit. Participants use drones equipped with cameras while wearing the head mounted displays that let them see where they are going at the race. The goal is to complete a set course as quickly as possible. These races started to be seen as an amateur sport in Australia in 2014.

In 2016, the sport is an entirely different thing. After groups of enthusiast start creating what today is the FPV Racing League, which creates regulations and rules to offer a fair race among the pilots.

The most accessible league to drone racing is Multi-GP an authentic racing league for first-person view radio controlled aircraft. They also are the Academy of Model Aeronautics Special Interest Group for FPV in the United States.

Aerodynamically talking, quad-copters or multi-rotor aren’t very sophisticated. As a racing, flying artifact, we can say that is a brick with propels and a battery attached. Pilots and their teams need to use their engineering skills to make the aircraft more aerodynamic as more efficient, for example, lighter body better maneuverability. Using techniques such as wind tunnel testing and computational fluid dynamics, commercial manufacturers start working on new aerodynamic developments for their drones.

The Drone Racing League isn't alone in the market. Recently the U.S. National Drone Racing Championship took place in 2015 at the California state fair with a 2-day event and prizes up to US$25,000. It was the first event like this in the United States and it brought more than 110 participants. However this isn't the first event in the world like this, other countries like France, Australia, and the UK held similar events in the past.

It is currently tough for these leagues to find funding due to the lack of knowledge about this new sport. Funds for events like the National Championship come from the state and ticket sales at the event. Now in 2016 the Drone Racing League received a $1 million dollar investment from the same owner of the Miami Dolphins Football Team. It helps the league to find better event locations and to make better circuits to attract more crowds.