How Red Bull Made a Drone Faster Than Formula 1

this

drone

is

faster

than an F1 car Red Bull recently raced a Formula 1 car against a

drone

and it wasn't just in a straight line, it was around the Silverstone circuit, one of the fastest tracks with the tightest corners. fast on the F1 calendar. It's a circuit. where the Formula 1 cars feel at home a track where they are 42 seconds per lap

faster

than a McLaren Center but in this race the Drone was much faster this is a drone capable of reaching two speeds of 120 mph but the most Impressive is a drone that accelerates from 0 to 185 mph in just 4 seconds, significantly faster than an F1 car and it's not just acceleration where it excels, but also turning, this drone produces more lateral turning capability than any car. of Formula 1.

It is the fastest camera drone in the world. and Incredibly I managed to talk to the founder of dir drone Gods, the company that created this beast, and he shared with me the fascinating story of how they designed the world's fastest camera drone, how they overcame huge engineering problems, what it's like to be the only fastest person. that Max V at Silverstone and a little secret about how fast it could really go. This is a typical racing drone that is used in competitions and as you can see, they are quite fast. It is a quadcopter design that weighs between 800 and 900 G, but just look at how they fly, a quadcopter needs to lean forward to accelerate, so the propellers propel the drone forward, but when that happens, the surface area of ​​the drone The force that pushes through the air increases greatly, causing great resistance when hitting.

Basically a wall of air and aerodynamics are working against you and that is one of the reasons why these drones have a top speed of only 90 mph, so the typical design of a racing drone was not going to be enough, they needed a higher top speed, so Ralph The team looked at a rocket drone design, this concept uses propellers designed to fly perpendicular to the ground, meaning that most of the propeller's power can be used to move the drone forward, but if the quadcopter design is basically turned on its side, it would be very unstable and impossible to fly around a circuit, so to give it more stability the Drone has this nose on the front that looks like a rocket.

Now this type of design is not new, it has been used before for top speed world record attempts like this. Luke Max Mo Bell's attempt we have a new record and this attempt was incredible, he managed to reach a top speed of 41 km per but this is very different to the Red Bull challenge first, it is just a straight line speed attempt and the rules They are completely different, they take the average speed over a distance of 100m and you have to do it in both directions, so Luke only needed his drone to be fast over 100m, but Silverstone is 589.91M which is almost 60 times longer and Silverstone has 18 corners which are a very nice mix of slow, medium and fast corners, meaning Ralph and his team would have to figure out how to make the Drone turn and accelerate faster than an F1 car and that's not it. a simple task, so where on Earth did they do it?

Starting well, the whole process was not that fast, we took a year in total for the whole project and the final drone is internally we call it V3, but there were a couple of versions before drone number three, the first drone was basically a mule of test to narrow down the hardware they needed, the team tried different batteries, motors and propellers, and this first version didn't even have a camera as they were basically just collecting data; Then the second version was to test the GoPro camera and its stabilization because the team knew that with all that power going through the propellers there would be a lot of vibration and that would be a challenge for the camera and the final version had to do with optimizing operations , we really

made

it shorter, lighter, we optimized everything we worked with.

Then Red Bull Advanced Technologies wanted to make it even lighter, so they

made

the canopy the outside and some of the carbon structures out of some really interesting materials to make it even lighter, but in terms of its initial design, everything It revolved around the battery. The problem is that a lap of Silverstone at the required pace takes a lot of power, meaning the designers had to start by calculating how much battery power they were going to need for a Flatout lap and, more importantly, how big and heavy that battery was. . be and if you look at the design of the Drone you will see that compared to drones focused on top speed, Ralph's drone has a much larger shaft and nose and that is mainly battery, the batteries are almost half the weight, I think between 40 and 50% of the weight, so they knew how big the batteries needed to be, but then it was a matter of figuring out how to pack them into the drone, because, like an F1 car, the distribution of the Weight dictates how it handles and that's important because remember this drone needs to turn and accelerate faster than an F1 car and how a drone turns is quite different than you expected, by the way, if you want to learn more about the topics covered in this video you should check out our sponsor shiny.org shiny. is an amazing learning tool and has thousands of interactive math data analysis lessons and artificial intelligence lessons, all of which you can learn Learning a little every day is one of the most important things you can do and Brilliant helps you develop real knowledge in minutes per day and it is also of great quality.

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This would cause the Drone to turn too sharply or get out of control. Now this sounds like a complex process and it is, but Ralph doesn't have to individually control the motors. There is a control unit that understands the information from the pilot and also how much the Drone works. it's spinning and then it adjusts the motors appropriately, it's constantly monitoring via a drone's gyroscope how much it's rotated and it's like, I think, 4000 times a second, it's trying to recalculate and once it gets close to the position it needs to be in it. It will raise or lower the correct motors again for thousands of times per second, but it was not all smooth sailing.

Ralph admitted that the first drone was very difficult to fly because, like a racing car, if the weight distribution is not in the vehicle it can handle in a strange way, we changed the weight distribution a little to improve cornering because the first It was really unstable when trying to corner, so we moved the weight distribution a little back and a little forward to try to find that sweet spot, so with the weight distribution sorted, let's take a look under the hood, Inside the nose cover, there is an SLS 3D printed chassis that houses the batteries, camera and other electronics, as you can see in the image, it is quite minimal to save weight.

The chassis is then attached to four carbon fiber arms that hold the engines and propellers. Now these engines and propellers are something else. They spin at 42,000 RPM. Propellers are off-the-shelf components, but the team tested different propeller lengths and pitches, and it's important. To get the right balance between propeller length and pitch, as it has a big effect on performance, make the propeller too long and it takes more power to turn it, draining the batteries too quickly and if you lengthen it too much, the tip of the propeller will actually go away. so fast it approaches and can break through the sand barrier, causing all sorts of problems, as I mentioned in our video about the Aussie Invader 5 land speed record car and something well explained in this old documentary, firstly, The diameter can be increased, allowing a high aspect ratio blade shape to be maintained, but increasing tip speed, which is of critical importance as compressibility effects at transonic and supersonic speeds.

They greatly increase drag, which reduces the efficiency of the propellers. On the other hand, if the propellers are too short, they have very little surface area to push against the air, which means there is not enough thrust for the high speeds required and it is not just the length the team needed to test it, but also was the launch pitch, it basically makes that column of air move down, go faster because you're lifting more air with the same RPM, but then it becomes harder for the engine to spin it because it has more resistance against the air, so that for the size of the motor we had, if we put more pitch than we had now, basically the motor was struggling to get the RPM to work and if the propeller is too flat and has too little pitch then it won't move enough air and the Drone will never reach top speed, so the team played with length and stride until they had the right balance between speed and efficiency.

If you've ever considered a role in F1 or motorsport and want some tips to improve your chances, we're hosting a free webinar led by F1's former head of talent. team is April 22nd and you can find details in the description, so the Drone was pretty much together, but the team was still worried about whether it would be fast enough to keep up with Max at Silverstone and it was at this point . that Red Bull came in to offer some F1 assistive technology that the Dutch drone gods didn't have access to and then Red Bull Advanced Technologies came in with their materials and their production techniques to make it even lighter.

They made the canopy on the outside and some of the structures out of carbon with some really cool materials like in their Formula 1 factory. Ralph was also the pilot of the Drone, which is an FPV type drone with first person view. I have video glasses in which it basically shows the live feed from the Drone, so it is more or less the same perspective that you see in the final video, but with very low quality and since the police corner is at 1000 m from where Ralph was flying the Drone, the first thing I thought was that surely there is a delay between what the drone is actually doing and what Ralph was seeing in the glasses, but there was only a delay of 30 milliseconds, that is, 3 hundredths of a second, which is very fast and more than enough for Ralph to control the drone correctly and the goggles had the drone's telemetry turned on.

They also showed Ralph things like battery status, battery voltage, speed and RPM, similar to what an F1 driver might see on his dashboard, but the most interesting thing to me was that Ralph was not the only person who was piloting it, so we basically have a team of four people. that's Ralph piloting the Drone, he's focused on keeping up with Max and keeping him in range, then someone watches the telemetry ready to warn Ralph if the batteries are dying too fast or if something gets too hot and finally there's someone plus flying a completely different drone, so he is flying. another drone over the runway, um, that has a signal relay, so that's the only way I can get the signal to travel the entire runway around all the buildings and everything that involves additional team members on this way is critical because Ralph's focus needed to be 100% in flight because unlike the average mavic drone this type of drone can't fly itself, this drone doesn't know what's up or down so you're just controlling the position of the drone and the position rat it changes and does nothing for you except when you press the emergency button to fly back, maybe, but otherwise it is completely manual and this makes sense to me.

It also happens in car racing, where something like a Ferrari race car will have driver aids and While they make an amateur driver much faster and safer, a professional will always prefer the freedom of having all aids disabled, for example. what in the Red Bull video we see the Drone comfortably following Max, but in reality we neverThey mention how much faster the Drone could go. so I asked Ralph how it compared with acceleration, braking and cornering, first with acceleration, ER and when you watch the videos, this is where the Red Bull drone looks the fastest. Take a look at when they first ran on Milbrook's proven terrain, just look at that.

Things take off as the Old Red Bull struggles for grip on a wet surface, but by the magic of editing, the two are reasonably close at the end of the race, but I doubt that was the actual result, so the Acceleration drones mostly have advantage. cars because they are very light and agile and the power to salary ratio is crazy, this drone doesn't even accelerate that fast compared to normal racing drones, uh, because it's still quite heavy, uh, but we still accelerate the car quite a bit . Well, I think we go from 100 to 300 km per hour in 2 seconds, that is, 1 n to the Drone, but what about turning?

Surely with all that Arrow, the F1 car has an effortless chance. It's actually pulling the same as five six GS cars. pulling there, uh, and I could probably pull a lot more if I just turned it, but this really impressive turning ability is only at high speed, since you have air resistance acting on the nose, as I mentioned before, at slower speeds, there is less air pushing. the outside of the nose, which means turning the Drone is more dependent on the propellers, resulting in a lower gForce, but the Drone still turns faster than the F1 car, so 2-0 for the Drone.

However, the most impressive thing about an F1 car is how quickly it decelerates and fortunately the F1 car can recover. One point here is that slowing down is more of a problem because yes, a modern Formula 1 car breaks down at 5 GS or something, it really decelerates quickly and if I stop accelerating, basically the Drone continues because it's built. Like a

bull

et shape, the Drone has no brakes and Ralph can't just hit the motors in reverse, it would make it too unstable, so he relies solely on drag to slow him down and that's just not as good as tons of cargo. aerodynamics and four carbon brakes, so 21 on the Drone, but how much faster would the Drone be if they did a flat lap right?

The first thing to note was that the lap was done in the wet in February, which is not ideal conditions for an F1 car, so the lap took approximately 2 minutes, around 30 seconds slower than a lap record. dry, but Ralph calculated that the Drone would be significantly faster than even the lap record, maybe about 10 seconds faster than a car like a 118, so that's a very fast lap between the white Lin and I can't think of nothing more than it would be faster, but let me know what you think in the comments below and what's interesting to me about Ralph and all the engineers I've talked to is that they are always trying to make things faster, lighter , stronger and, well, just better, as we have seen in our other videos.

Engineers are always pushing the limits, it's a constant cycle of improvement and then they find a weakness, so what's next to improve on this? drone to make it even faster definitely, some more battery technology would help this drone, then you could put more, much more capacity into that battery and still have the power output to reach top speeds, so a request similar to a motorsports engineer more power with the same weight and the same size Engineers simply never change. I recently spoke to an F1 aerodynamicist about how he would design an F1 car if there were no rules and it was fascinating, just click here to watch it now.

Thank you so much. to Ralph for the interview. You can find more information about him and the team at Dutch Dron Goods.com and his Instagram page. Thank you very much and see you next time.