Santa Clara, CA, USA (Nov. 4, 2016) – Today Intel is announcing the Intel® Shooting StarTM drone, the company’s first drone created specifically for entertainment light shows. The Intel Shooting Star drone is designed with safety and creativity in mind with a super light-weight structure and virtually limitless color combinations. The fleet is easily programmed, assembled and operated to create beautifully choreographed images in the nighttime sky for an amazing new entertainment experience.
Materials and Engineering
Weighing in at only 280 grams or less than the weight of a volleyball, the Intel Shooting Star drone is constructed with a soft frame made of flexible plastics and foam and contains no screws. The quadcopter’s propellers are also protected by covered cages – all features designed to ensure the drone is safe to fly, is splash-proof and can fly in light rain.
Type
Quadcopter with encased propellers
Size
384 x 384 x 93mm
Rotor Diameter
6’’ (~15cm)
Max Take Off Weight
280g
Flight Time
Up to 20 mins
Max Range
1.5 km
Max Tolerable Wind Speed
10 m/s
Max GPS mode Airspeed
10 m/s
Max Light Show Airspeed
3 m/s
Animation and Operation
The Intel Shooting Star drone features built-in LED lights that can create over 4 billion color combinations based on RGBW (red, green, blue and white) LED. With the improved software and animation interface on the Intel Shooting Star drone, a light show can now be created in a matter of days instead of weeks or months. Intel’s proprietary algorithims can automate the animation creation process by using an image and quickly calculating the number of drones needed, determining where drones should be placed and formulating the fastest path to create the image in the sky. Previously, it would take animators much longer to manually determine these calculations.
The light show software also runs a complete fleet check prior to each flight and is able to select the most optimized drones for each flight based on battery life, GPS reception and more. Additionally, the entire fleet of Intel Shooting Star drones can be easily controlled by one computer. The fleet size is dependent on the animation needed and can range from hundreds of Intel Shooting Star drones or even more in the future.