Jubilee Concert Drones

Amazing drone display at the Jubilee Concert in the Mall (watching on BBC1).

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What kind of positioning system do this kind of drone use? Looked very precise.
Do the drones communicate with each other? or just kept apart and in position by ground control?
However it was done, was best feature of the concert…

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Diana Ross wasn’t bad.

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Wife asked how it was done - I told her there were hundreds of operators with controllers in the gardens of the palace.

She believed me :rofl:

Keep an eye on the Sky Magic website/socials. With something this high profile, hopefully they’ll post a write up soon.

Just plain brilliant :heart_eyes:

They use GPS for the outdoor displays with a single command and control system but each drone can communicate with every other via a private encrypted network in custom flight controllers containing AR augmented reality sw. Inter positioning is between 1.5 and 3 metres. And the entire swarm is usually geo fenced for safety so if the swarm moves outside the fence they auto land. But that’s the easy part of the tech. The tricky part is the months of positional story boarding, motion capture modelling, animation, VFX CAD artistry using the standard film industry film modelling tools that gets crunched down into the motion art display software that gets uploaded into the swarm. That takes a lot of time and money and the talent of visual artists creating the motion graphics from models and real life animals. There are approx only a couple of dozen companies in the world that have the all round expertise to do this stuff. In the UK it’s Celestial Art/Celestial Labs based in Somerset. You can’t buy drone light shows off the shelf. The drones are all custom built with the exception of a French company that uses off the shelf Parrots and then convert them with custom hardware. Each company does it slightly differently. It’s all custom software and firmware so you’re talking serious internal sw coding capabilities also.

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Correction. Celestial designed some custom animation and specialised images e.g. the crown for the Jubilee drone show but Sky Magic was the company doing the show.