The highlight of this year’s voestalpine Klangwolke in Linz, Austria, was a choreographed air show with 50 small helicopters equipped with LEDs. Ars Electronica Futurelab and Ascending Technologies GmbH set a world record with this, because this was the largest swarm of these “quadrocopters” (so called because of their four rotors) outdoors at the same time.
Perhaps this story really speaks to the fact that this would not have been allowed in the USA.....
Comments
Wonder if they had 50 pilots standing by. GPS & air pressure being what they are, it took a lot of timelapse to make the video bearably fast enough. They still had to get all the flying under 10 minutes. Wish they picked a more durable theme than the cloud in the web. Is anyone going to care about the cloud in a year, any more than they care about myspace now?
All I know is I have been lucky enough to fly and see a Falcon 8 being flown many times and its a great platform that really does what it says it does. I have also seen the guys give some pretty amazing demos as well.
Very nice! wow... I wonder if they had any collision? you can see there is some quads that stay on the ground when they take off..
Any specs?
This is what the link says:
50 AscTec Hummingbird quadrocopters were used for the world premiere. This aircraft has already proven its reliability in many task areas. “The AscTec Hummingbird has outstanding flight attitude and position control, which was an important prerequisite not only because of safety concerns with a performance with thousands of spectators in the middle of the city,” said Daniel Gurdan, one of the four founders of Ascending Technologies. “In addition, we were excited about the creativity and the artistic aspect of this project.” In order to allow the Ars Electronica team to create computerized choreography, the company equipped the miniature helicopters with special radio receivers and slightly modified firmware. Otherwise, the quadrocopter, with a take-off weight of only 500 grams, was simply a standard model.
That was pretty slick, no doubt. I was hoping to hear what 50 quads sounded like...
Here is the video:
http://gizmodo.com/5940510/watching-49-quadrocopters-fly-and-swarm-...