How I Built the NEW World's Fastest Drone

This is a high-speed drone and this is me moments  before I attempted to break the Guinness World   Record for the fastest drone in the world. Last  year my dad and I did something similar with the   original Peregreen drone but this year we're  trying to take our drone to the next level and   crush the competition that came before it. There  are many different aspects of design when it comes   to creating a high-speed drone but I've decided  to narrow it down to 4 which we will go through   in this video. Which by the way was the most  frustrating and difficult project I've ever worked   on. The first design aspect is the frame. For our  frame material we went with carbon fiber because   of its wide availability and incredible strength.  We got our custom frames cut at Flying Robot in   Cape Town using a CNC machine. Also just a quick  thank you to Insta 360 for sponsoring this video.   I'll be using their Go3 camera to shoot loads of  different parts of this video. So all the CNC is   finished and you'll see we've got these really  nice carbon fiber pieces and the great thing about   CNC is you get really high precision so you'll  see that these motor mounts for the holes line up   perfectly with the actual mounts on ... the motor!  We got the mounting hole dimensions wrong on these   CNC cuts so I'm out in the garage to drill new  holes. I love how the Go3 is magnetic which   makes it super easy to mount to a bunch of random  locations and get some really interesting angles. The second design aspect is the powertrain. This  is obviously an incredibly important part of the   drone because it's what pushes it through the  air. Using the data we gathered from Peregreen 1   I was able to select the ideal Motors propellers  and batteries to use for Peregreen2. This year   the theme is simply bigger is better. Now it's  time to do a bench test with all of our chosen   components and yep on our very first bench  test we had our first fire of the project.   And the first time we got smoke it actually  came from one of the batteries and I was so   certain that this battery must just be a dud that  we ran the test again. And another battery smoked,   so clearly that isn't the case. I've actually  taken the battery apart here to see what happened   and as you can see here's the burnt portion.  It just carried so much current that it got   so hot and couldn't handle it that it just  broke apart. There. So I've opened the 2nd   battery here and you can see it's failed  in the exact same spot as the 1st battery.   We ran the thermal camera on these batteries and  found they were getting above 130° C. Way too hot   so no wonder they were popping. Just a reminder  you can't always trust companies claims about   what their products can handle. After trying to  work around the heat for weeks we managed to get   new batteries and thankfully these stayed below  80° C at full power draw. With our batteries now   cool enough to fly, we found another issue. Our  motor wires were getting suspicously hot during   full load. Eventually during one of our bench  tests the motor wires even burst into flames.   So as we have now very dramatically learned the  wires that come installed with the motors are   not quite thick enough for our application.  So what I've done here is I've got a little   experiment and I've got the original wires  then I've got one thicker and one more thicker. As you can see the thin wire got so hot that it  desoldered itself from the ESC. Clearly too thin   so we opted for the wire with medium thickness.  Now that we had dialed in our powertrain for the   drone is time to move on to the third aspect of  highspeed drone design. The aerodynamics starting   with stability. So one of the big problems we had  with the first drone was instability when it was   going at really high speeds. So what we've done  now is we've actually created this little half   scale rough model of the new design and we've got  detachable tails on the end of the drone. So on   here's the short tail and then we've also got a  longer tail. And to record the testing, I'm going   to attach the Go3 to the car so that we've got  really good footage to analyze the tests later.   By allowing the model to spin around the center  of gravity we were able to check if the center   of pressure is behind the center of gravity to  get an inherently stable shape. It turned out to   our surprise that neither the short nor the long  tail was stable. The drone kept settling on this   weird angle so we played around with some fins on  the back which seemed to provide enough force to   keep the drone pointing straight. We then further  refined the model and tested more fin sizes to   create our final shape this left us with an outer  shell that we knew would provide stability and a   low drag coefficient. My dad drew up the model  and then we 3D printed and assembled it. So I'm   finally finished putting the drone all together  and we've got the finished model over here. As you   can see it is quite a lot larger than the version  1. We've just come out to this field and we're   just going to do some test flying give it its  maiden flight. Well in case that wasn't obvious   enough that didn't go as well as planned. After  contemplating giving up the project for about 15   minutes the only thing left to do was to reprint  all the parts and rebuild the drone from the   ground up. After a couple days the drone was fully  rebuilt and ready for a successful test flight. This is the face of a man whose work from the  past 2 months literally just went up in flames,   twice! It was during this time when my dad  and I needed to wait a couple weeks for new   electronics to arrive that we decided that we  were going to completely redesign the whole   drone body. We didn't feel good about what  we had done so far and saw many ways we could   improve it. My dad has made a separate video  on his channel going through the entire design   process and what choices he made when designing  the drone so definitely go and check it out after   you finish this video. What we were left with  is this the official design for Peregreen 2 and   of course we did our classic car window test to  check for stability. We then 3D printed all of   our parts using the Bambu X1 Carbon. I have to  say this is the best 3D printer I've ever used   and it did an incredible job with this project.  I'm genuinely looking forward to all the awesome   things I'll print with this thing in the future  future. I do also love watching these time lapses   it creates they're super mesmerizing to watch. Our new design was printed built and ready to   fly. Which brings us to the 4th and final aspect  of high-speed drone design. The tuning things   started out looking positive but soon took  a turn for the worse. We were having a lot   of issues during flight and to help fix this we  turned to the help of Chris Rosser a well-known   expert and YouTuber in the field of FPV drones.  So having looked at the video that you sent over   to me this is something that I've seen before. It  would help me if you could answer just a couple of   questions to help me diagnose the problem. If you  bring your drone around other drones does it have   trouble socializing with the other drones. Do you  find that it tends to to bully or make fun of the   other drones for being weak and pointless. Yeah  actually now that you mention it I have it has   actually been showing that kind of behavior. I  mean this this is something that that we do have   to deal with in the industry. Sometimes it just  becomes used to all this attention all this praise   you know. Oh you're the fastest. You're the best  and it just gets a little bit too arrogant. You   basically get spoiled drone syndrome. This can  lead to it attempting to to do things that you   don't tell it to do. Attempting to do tricks  that you don't want it to do and basically   just showing off. Yeah, wow, I didn't even know  that that was a a condition that they could get.   With any top athlete it's a psychological game.  It's been really helpful to talk to you. Now   I can see why they call you the Drone Whisperer.  You know these are problems that we will have to   face in the industry. All jokes aside and after  following Chris's advice and his in-depth tuning   guides we managed to get Peregreen 2 in top shape  with an excellent tune for highspeed flying. So   after literal months of prototyping trial and  error and failures. We're finally back at the   Worcester Gliding Club and you'll probably  remember this if you watched the first video.   And what we're going to do now, is basically  a highspeed run with no witnesses or anyone   here because we just want to make sure  that everything works 100% before we do   the world record attempt. We've just got tape  on here for now that's going to come off and   going to be glued on when we actually fly on  the world record attempt. But as you can see   this is it all together and it's looking  pretty sleek. We've got that clear tail   at the end which might look weird but you'll  see why we have a clear tail there in a bit. While we didn't get any failures midair, the drone  was not as fast as we'd hoped in these runs. It   only reached around 400 km per hour which is fast  but really not good enough. But we were not going   to give up now we decided to go for the timely and  expensive option of replacing all 4 motors with   ones of a slightly different KV value. As well  as doing a few other aerodynamic improvements.   So right now I'm sanding basically every  surface of this thing so that all these   transitions between different materials  are smooth so that these massive covers   are smooth and basically everything just  needs to be as aerodynamic as possible. So the time finally came to see what this  drone is capable of and what speeds we could   get. The attempt has to be done with multiple  independent witnesses. To get the final results,   the 2 100 m speedruns need to be  performed in opposite directions   to negate the effects of wind. 3 Months of  hard work failures and Engineering would   ultimately come down to a few seconds of  high-speed flying. Oh my God 500 km an hour Ok we ready... and  now I'm starting the speedrun [Music] So we finally heard back from Guinness and they've  approved all of our results which means we are   officially the new record holders for this title  which is so exciting. It's been such a long work   in progress that to get that result and get that  confirmation just means a lot to me and my Dad.   We're not done just yet we of course want some  more epic footage of Peregreen 2 flying. So we   did some pretty cool rigs and some setups to try  and get some more cinematic shots with the drone   and I'm going to show those to you now. So this is our new open canopy and what it'll do   is give the camera a perfectly clear view so  we won't have the distortion we got from the   dome previously. And hopefully that means we can  get some pretty cool cinematic highspeed shots.   This fight was actually a pretty monumental one  for me. I was expecting massive instability and   unusable footage. But what we got was kind of  incredible. The drone could easily go over 400   kmph without even pushing the throttle to 80%.  On on top of that it was handling fairly smooth,   cornering at speeds of 300 and even 400 kmph. No  other drone can do this and we had accidentally   created the fastest camera drone in the world.  With some adjustments to the control algorithms   to improve stability the potential of shots  this drone could capture, is huge. We also did   an endurance run and managed to get a flight of  7.5 km or 4.6 M while flying at an average speed   of 180 kmph or 112 mph. The insta 360 Go3 made  the perfect camera to mount to canopy of the   drone because of how small and light it is. And  we managed to get these really cool shots. We did   some relatively slow flybys of about 360 kmh or  224 mph to get some really closeup footage. I love   how the drone is only at 60% throttle for these  runs. By the way none of this footage is sped up.   We also took the drone to one of my  favorite beaches in Cape Town to get   some more scenic footage. The 1st 20  people to use my link below will get   20% off for the Go3 as well as a free gift  from insta 360. Also remember to check out   the video from my Dad about the in-depth  design of this drone and lastly make sure   you subscribe to see what epic plans  we have for this drone in the future.

Channel: Luke Maximo Bell

Views: 897,746

Keywords: world record drone, fastest drone, worlds fastest drone, guinness world record, redbull drone, formula 1 drone, high speed racing drone, guinness world record drone, rebull F1 drone, red bull, fastest, DJI, 500kmh, 300mph, 300 mph, 500 kmh, world record, fastest drone on earth, peregreen, luke maximo bell, quad, quadcopter, quadmovr, F1, race

Id: wThmg8Ezm9w

Length: 15min 6sec (906 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2024