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Pretty much everyone these days knows that some companies can launch thousands of drones in the air and perform a breathtaking show with light and moving animation. This is an incredible piece of engineering, but  in attempt to do something similar one should consider technological, personnel and logistical capabilities of a worldwide corporation.

At Geoscan ltd, we decided to create our own droneshow on a budget using our already developed platform called Pioneer. Originally this quadcopter kit was designed for educational purposes. It is distributed to schools and technical communities to get students familiar with this kind of robots. The platform itself is modular, programmable and easy to assemble and use. 1300 mAh battery gives it solid 8 minutes of flight time. Equipped with GPS and LED modules, it turns into a perfect unit to run any kind of airshow imaginable.

Firstly, the animation is designed in any 3D editor. After that it is converted into multiple Lua script, which are uploaded to each Pioneer before takeoff. Despite we don’t use some expensive tech like RTK, there’s never been any serious issues during the flight. In the air each drone acts independently according to its pre-loaded trajectory, using GPS coordinates for orientation and barometer for altitude control.  There’s also a safety mode, which allows switching the whole swarm in manual control mode and landing it in case something goes wrong.

The first test flights took place in august involving 5, later 10 drones. Two months later, ten dozens of buzzing lights performed a breathtaking show on the Black sea coast. Having main troubles sorted out, we are currently improving animation capabilities and hope to launch 200 drones simultaneously by the end of 2018. You can learn more on our webpage  https://www.geoscan.aero/en/pioneer/. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding Pioneer drone.