For the 2018 Winter Olympics, Intel set off to set the world record for the most drone flights made by launching 1218 drones into the air at the opening ceremony making shapes of birds, snowboarders, skiers and the five Olympic rings.
The record setting flight was supposed to take place at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang but however that remand impossible to due to a number of reasons. Although NBC’s delayed U.S. broadcasting of the opening ceremony made it possible to look behind the scenes of how the flight would have looked like.
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The video showed the challenges faced by the Intel team and how they worked in freezing temperatures and ever-changing weather conditions. However the team was eventually able to launch over twice the number of its Shooting Star mini drones from its previous 500-drone record, and the results were indeed stunning. Sadly, the drones didn’t get off the ground for the originally planned day.
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Citing one of the reasons for not launching the drones at the ceremony, an Olympics organizing committee member said,
“During the Ceremony, POCOG made the decision to not go ahead with the show because there were too many spectators standing in the area where the live drone show was supposed to take place.”
Anil Nanduri is the Vice President in the New Technology Group and general manager of unmanned aviation systems for the Perceptual Computing Group at Intel Corporation. Commenting on the Intel Drones initiative earlier on, he said,
“We believe drones are an important computing platform for the future and we are continuing to invest in technologies and companies that will enable us to provide the best compute, sensor, communications and software integration for the growing drone ecosystem.”
To take a look at what the launch looked watch the video below by Intel:
Image Source: Intel
