[dolfje]

I'm founder of https://and-lights.eu and it's not that simple of just purchasing. There are mainly three aspects.

First you have the hardware itself, your drones. Best is to create them yourself. As there aren't many of the shelf products and they are mostly coming from China where safety concerns aren't that high valued as US and EU. For example letting them do a return to home, is a nightmare. As they will just fly across your other drones and hit other while doing. We have also incorporated lots of redundancy, so that we have different ways to communicate with the drone. And also a manual override so that you can steer the drone personally into safety.

Next you have the software. That will steer the drones. You have two possibilities for that. Either pre-program all drones with a gps path and send a start signal. Or do it our way and realtime manage the drones (ofcourse with backup path if communcation fails). On the lower level of the software we have our red box that does collision avoidance. So even if you ask the drones to go through each other, that box will stop them before they hit eachother. On top of that we have the real route planning that should produce non-hitting paths. Real-time planning is harder to implement. But it makes sure that you can replace drones if pre-flight checks doesn't let the drone fly. And also makes sure you can adapt the show mid-air. For example to sync up with a live performance.

And then the 'boring' part. Getting a license. We have already created more than 800 pages of certification and safety procedures. Just to get a license. That is because in a lot of countries drones are certified as airplanes. So procedures are also like airplanes. Flying a normal drone is possible, but for drone shows you have to get 3 exceptions certified. Namely flying at night, flying in formation and automatic flying. And by creating your own drone, you also need to homologate and certify your drone.

Hope I gave you a little hint of what is needed ;)

[totetsu]

Are you swapping out batteries of drones mid show?

[ngcc_hk]

Great.

But if one has to start where one to start. I assume it is more open and not just one firm.

And you need to hardware, software and license. No chinese unsafe components, but which is the safe to go to (> one). Software any open source. The license probably depend upon country but for us, Canada, uk and eu how hard it is?