Off to the Drone Races

Drone racing is catching serious attention. Could this become a major sport in the future? And what about other non-traditional, futuristic sports?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, come fly
with me, let's fly, let's fly away. I'm Jonathan Strickland,

(00:21):
I'm La, and I'm Joe McCormick. Today we're gonna be
talking about one specific sliver of the future of sports
right specifically, the kinds of sports that don't involve moving
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

(00:44):
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

(01:04):
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

(01:25):
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

(01:46):
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

(02:09):
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

(02:30):
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.

(02:52):
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

(03:15):
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

(03:36):
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.

(03:59):
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

(04:21):
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

(04:44):
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

(05:05):
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

(05:26):
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

(05:50):
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,

(06:11):
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

(06:33):
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

(06:54):
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

(07:15):
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

(07:38):
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.

(07:58):
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

(08:19):
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

(08:40):
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

(09:02):
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

(09:26):
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

(09:47):
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

(10:10):
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

(10:32):
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,

(10:56):
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

(11:17):
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

(11:38):
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

(12:00):
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.

(12:21):
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

(12:44):
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,

(13:05):
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

(13:27):
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,

(13:48):
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

(14:10):
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

(14:30):
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

(14:52):
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,

(15:16):
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

(15:37):
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

(16:00):
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

(16:22):
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

(16:42):
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,

(17:05):
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,

(17:27):
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

(17:48):
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

(18:09):
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

(18:31):
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

(18:54):
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

(19:16):
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

(19:40):
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

(20:01):
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,

(20:22):
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

(20:44):
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,

(21:05):
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

(21:28):
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

(21:49):
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.

(22:12):
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

(22:33):
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

(22:56):
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

(23:17):
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,

(23:38):
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

(23:59):
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

(24:22):
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

(24:43):
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

(25:04):
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

(25:27):
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

(25:48):
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

(26:09):
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

(26:31):
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

(26:53):
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

(27:16):
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

(27:37):
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

(28:00):
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.

(28:24):
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

(28:46):
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,

(29:09):
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,

(29:32):
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

(29:55):
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

(30:17):
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

(30:40):
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

(31:02):
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

(31:25):
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

(31:47):
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

(32:12):
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

(32:32):
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

(32:52):
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

(33:14):
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

(33:36):
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

(33:58):
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

(34:21):
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

(34:43):
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,

(35:06):
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,

(35:27):
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

(35:48):
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

(36:10):
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

(36:30):
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

(36:53):
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

(37:13):
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

(37:34):
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

(37:57):
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

(38:17):
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

(38:41):
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

(39:04):
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

(39:24):
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,

(39:47):
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

(40:07):
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.

(40:28):
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

(40:48):
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

(41:09):
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,

(41:32):
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

(41:53):
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

(42:14):
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

(42:34):
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

(42:56):
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.

(43:17):
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.

(43:38):
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

(44:01):
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

(44:21):
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

(44:44):
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

(45:07):
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

(45:32):
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

(45:54):
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

(46:18):
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

(46:41):
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

(47:03):
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.

(47:25):
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

(47:47):
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,

(48:12):
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

(48:35):
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

(48:55):
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

(49:15):
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

(49:36):
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

(49:57):
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,

(50:20):
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

(50:42):
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

(51:03):
want to hear about it. Uh. You can get in
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(51:28):
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