How This DRONE Outpaced an F1 Car!

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 fastest corners on f1's calendar it's a circuit where Formula 1 cars are very much at home a track where they're 42 seconds a lap faster than a McLaren Center but in this race the Drone was way faster this is a drone capable of two 120 mph but more impressively 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 it's when turning as well this drone produces more lateral GeForce that's turning capability than any Formula 1 car is that the fastest camera drone in the world and Incredibly I managed to speak 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 massive engineering problems what it's like being the only person faster than Max V stappen around Silverstone and a little secret about how much faster it really could go this is a typical racing drone they're used in competitions and as you can see they're pretty fast they're a quadricopter design weighing between 800 and 900 G but just look at at how they fly a quadricopter needs to pitch forward to accelerate so the propellers are driving the Drone forward but when that happens the surface area of the Drone pushing through the air increases a lot causing a lot of drag you hit a wall of of air basically and the aerodynamics are working against you and that's one of the reasons these drones have a top speed of only 90 mph so the typical racing drone design wasn't going to cut it they needed a higher top speed so Ralph on the team looked to 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 quadricopter design is basically just 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 which looks like a rocket now this type of design isn't new it's been used for maximum speed world record attempts before such as this attempt by Luke Max Mo Bell we do 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's just a speed attempt in a straight line and the rules are completely different they take the average speed over a 100 m distance and you got to do that in both directions so Luke only needed his drone to be fast over 100 m but Silverstone is 589 91 M that's almost 60 times longer and Silverstone has 18 turns which are a very enjoyable combination of slow medium and fast Corners meaning that Ralph and his team would have to figure out how to make the Drone break turn and accelerate faster than an F1 car and that is no simple task so where on Earth did they start well the whole process wasn't all that quick we took a year in total for the the whole project and the final drone is internally we call it the V3 but the were a couple of versions before drone number three the first drone was basically a test mule to narrow down the hardware that they needed the team tested different batteries Motors and propellers and this first version didn't even have a camera as they were basically just Gathering 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 was going to be a lot of vibration and that would be a challenge for the camera and the final version was all about op optimization we really made it shorter lighter optimized everything we worked with Red Bull Advanced Technologies then to make it even lighter so they made the canopy the outside part and some of the carbon structures from some really like cool materials to make it even lighter but in terms of their initial design it was all about the battery the big problem is that a lap of Silverstone at the required Pace needs a lot of power that means the designers had to start by figuring out how much battery power they were going to need for a Flatout lap and most importantly how big and heavy that battery was going to be and if you look at the Drone design you'll see that compared to the top speed focused drones Ralph's drone has a much larger shaft and nose and that's mostly battery the batteries is almost half of the weight I think 40 to 50% of the weight so they knew how big the batteries needed to be but it was then a case of figuring out how to package them in the Drone as just like an F1 car the distribution of weight dictates how it handles and that's important because remember this drone needs to break turn and accelerate faster than an F1 car and how a drone turns is quite different to what I expected by the way if you'd like to learn more about the topics covered in this video you should check out our sponsor brilliant.org brilliant is an incredible learning tool and has thousands of interactive maths data analysis programming and AI lessons all of which you can learn by doing learning a little every day is one of the most important things you can do and Brilliant helps you build real knowledge in minutes per day and it's great quality too an awardwinning team of teachers researchers and professionals craft all their content for example their how technology Works course takes you inside the technology you use every day helping you understand how it actually works to try everything brilliant offers for a full 30 days for free just visit brilliant.org d61 to start your free trial today or scan the QR code on screen you'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription so imagine the Drone is flying in a straight line but there's a corner coming up and we need to turn right as you might expect the outside propellers the ones on the left in this case ramp up their speed and the propellers on the right slow down their speed which then turns the Drone but then as soon as the nose turns across the air it experiences air resistance on the outside making the drone turn even more so then the propellers on the inside of the Drone ramp up their speed again in order to counteract the air resistance turning the nose of the Drone because if the propellers didn't do this the Drone would turn too sharply or spin out of control now this sounds like a complex process and it is but Ralph doesn't have to individually control the motors there's a control unit that understands the input from the pilot and also how much the Drone is turning and it then adjusts the motors appropriately it's constantly monitoring by the gyroscope in a drone how much it has turned and it's like I think 4,000 times per second it's trying to recalculate and once it gets closer to the position it needs to be in it will ramp up or down the correct Motors again to like so many thousands of times per second but it wasn't all plain sailing Ralph admitted that the first drone was very difficult to fly because like a race car if the weight distribution is off the vehicle can handle in a weird way we changed the weight distribution a bit to to to improve the cornering cuz um the first one was really unstable when when trying to corner so we moved kind of the the weight distribution bit back and a bit forward to try to find that sweet spot so with the weight distribution sorted let's take a look under the cover inside the nose cover is an SLS 3D printed chassis this holds the batteries camera and other electronics as you can see from the image it's pretty minimal in order to save weight then the chassis is attached to four carbon fiber arms that hold the motors and propellers now these motors and propellers are something else they spin at 42,000 RPM the propellers are off-the-shelf components but the team tested different propeller lengths and pitches and it's important to get the balance of the propeller's length and its pitch right 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 make it too long the propeller tip actually goes so quickly it approaches and might go through the sand barrier which causes all kinds of problems like I discussed 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 this enables an efficient High aspect ratio blade shape to be maintained but increases the tip velocity which is of critical importance since compressibility effects at transonic and supersonic speeds greatly increase d rag which reduces the propellers efficiency on the other hand if you make the propellers Too Short they have too little surface area to push against the air meaning not enough thrust for the high speeds required and it's not just the length that the team needed to test it was also the pitch pitch basically makes that column of air moving downwards uh go faster because you're scooping more air with the same RPM but then it gets harder for the motor to turn it to spin it because it has more resistance against the air so uh for the size motor that we had if we put more pitch than we had now basically the motor was struggling to get the RPM to go and if the propeller is too flat if it has too little pitch then it won't be moving enough air and so the Drone would never meet the top speed so the team played with the length and the pitch until they had the right balance between speed and efficiency by the way if you've ever considered a role in F1 or Motorsport and want some tips to improve your chances we're running a free webinar led by the ex- head of talent at an F1 team it's on the 22nd of April and you can find Details In the description so the Drone was pretty much together but the team was still worried about whether it was going to be quick enough to keep up with Max at Silverstone and it was at this point that Red Bull came in to offer some F1 technology assistance technology that the Dutch drone Gods didn't have access to themselves and then Red Bull Advanced Technologies came in with their uh uh materials and their production uh techniques to make it make it even lighter so they made the canopy the outside part and some of the carbon structures from some really like cool materials in their like in their Formula 1 Factory Ralph was also the pilot of the Drone which is an fpv firstperson view type drone I have video goggles on which basically show the live feed from the Drone so that's pretty much the same perspective you see in the end video but just very low quality and with cops Corner being 1,000 M from where Ralph was flying the Drone my first thought was surely there's a delay between what the Drone is actually doing and what Ralph was seeing in the goggles but there was only a 30 millisecond delay that's 3 hundredths of a second which is very quick and more than fast enough for Ralph to control the Drone properly and the goggles had the drone's Telemetry on them too showing Ralph things like battery status battery voltage speed and RPM similar to what an F1 driver can see on their dashboard but what was most interesting to me was that Ralph wasn't the only person flying it so we have basically four people team so that's Ralph piloting the Drone he's focused on keeping up with Max and keeping him in shot then someone watching the Telemetry ready to warn Ralph if batteries are draining too quickly or something's getting too hot and finally there's someone else flying a completely different drone so he's flying another drone above the track um which has a signal relay so that's that's the only way I can make the signal go around the full track around all the buildings and everything having the extra team members involved like this is critical because Ralph's Focus needed to be 100% on the flying because unlike your 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 rat of the position that it changes and it doesn't do anything for you except when you hit the emergency button to fly back maybe but otherwise uh it's it's fully manual and this makes sense to me it happens in car racing too where something like a Ferrari race car will have driver AIDS and while they make an amateur driver much quicker and safer a professional will always prefer the freedom of having all of the assists turned off so in the Red Bull video we see the Drone comfortably following Max but they never actually mention how much faster the Drone might go so I asked Ralph how it compared under acceleration breaking and cornering first up acceler ER ation and when you watch the videos this is where the Red Bull drone looks the quickest take a look at when they first raced card at milbrook proven ground just look at that thing take off meanwhile the Old Red Bull is scrambling for grip on a damp surface but by the magic of editing the two are reasonably close at the end of the run but I doubt that that was the actual result so acceleration drones mostly have the edge over cars because they're just so light and Nimble and the power to wage ratio is just insane this drone even it doesn't even accelerate that fast compared to normal racing drones uh because it's still quite heavy uh but still we out accelerate the car quite well I think we go 100 to 300 km an hour in 2 seconds so 1 n to the Drone but what about turning surely with all that Arrow the F1 car stands a chance without any effort it's actually pulling the same like five six GS as the cars pulling there uh and I could probably pull a lot more if I just turn it but this really impressive turning ability is only at high speed as you have the air resistance acting on the nose like I spoke about earlier at slower speeds there's less air pushing on the outside of the nose meaning turning the Drone relies more on the propellers resulting in a lower gForce but the Drone still turns more quickly than the F1 car so 2-0 to the Drone however what's most impressive about an F1 car well that's how quickly it slows down and thankfully the F1 car can retrieve a point here slowing it down is more of a problem cuz yeah a modern Formula 1 car breaks at like 5 GS or something it really slows down fast and and if I stop giving it throttle basically the Drone it just keeps on going because it's it's built like a bullet shape the Drone doesn't have brakes and Ralph can't just whack the motors in Reverse it would make the Drone too unstable so he's relying solely on drag to slow him down and that just isn't as good as tons of downforce and four carbon brakes so 21 on to the Drone but how much faster would the Drone be if they did a Flatout lap well the first thing to note was that theen lap was done in the wet in February which aren't ideal conditions for an F1 car and so the lap took about 2 minutes around 30 seconds slower than a lap record in the dry but Ralph reckoned the Drone would be significantly faster than even the lap record maybe like 10 seconds faster than a car like a 118 so that's a very quick lap keeping between the white Lin and I can't think of anything else that would be any quicker but let me know what you think in the comments below and what's interesting to me about Ralph and all the engineers that I've spoken to is that they're always trying to make things faster lighter stronger and well just better as we've seen in our other videos Engineers are always pushing boundaries it's a constant cycle of improvement and then finding a weakness so what's the next thing to improve on this drone to make it even faster definitely some more Battery Technology would help this drone then you could put more a lot more capacity into that battery um and still have the the the power the output to to reach top speeds so a similar request to a motorsport engineer more power with the same weight and the same size Engineers just never change I recently spoke to an F1 aerodynamicist about how he'd design an F1 car if there were no rules and it was fascinating just click here to watch it now thank you very much to Ralph for the interview you can find more more about him and the team at Dutch Dron goods.com and their Instagram page thank you very much and I'll see you next time

Channel: Driver61

Views: 138,054

Keywords: Red Bull, F1, Red Bull Drone, Dutch Drone Gods, Fastest Drone

Id: nmDgO4RABuA

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024