Monster Arts Inc (APPZ)

[AMJoe]

I'm not saying it can't or won't be done in the future. Just pointing out that the current solution does everything the NFL needs much more simply and cheaply than a drone, and also doesn't require a massive leap forward in battery technology.

Hovering uses lots of energy. Like stupid amounts of energy, because all you're doing is neutralizing gravity. The amount of energy is dependent on the weight of the vehicle, which is heavier than the cable vehicle, because...

If you hover, you have to bring batteries with you. (The current cable cam gets power for free from its cable.) This increases the weight, increasing the energy required to hover, which increases the number of batteries you have to bring with you in order to meet a required flight duration. Look up the Tsiolkovsky Equation for an idea of how much this sucks in the rocketry domain; there's probably a similar equation that applies to battery mass but I tend to think in terms of rockets.

If you hover, you have to bring a wireless communications system with you instead of just dumping it over the cable. High-bandwidth wireless comms uses a stupid amount of energy, and the antenna size/weight/power is now part of your weight budget... see above for why this sucks even more.

Travel time from your launch/landing site is part of your flight time, and you need to be conservative in case there's a headwind, or an obstruction. If you lose telemetry for even a moment, you'd better have a bail-out plan to get clear of the action.

...and batteries suck in cold weather, which is when all the best football is played.
via GPS once it senses low battery life

This requires (A) the ability to reliably always acquire a GPS signal -- and GPS sucks down a lot of power -- and (B) the ability to correctly measure remaining battery life in seconds (not just %). "My phone does those things fine" is a great argument but inside a stadium, with a battery that's being slurped down from full-to-empty several times a game, in variable temperatures and winds, and being blasted by RF energy from the satellite trucks, thousands of fans' phones, WiFi, on-board comms, the wireless headsets...

And if one of your four rotors or motors fails -- either from fatigue, or UV-related brittleness, or an Eagles fan throwing a battery at it -- your failure mode is still that you plummet to the field carrying a thousand-dollar camera. "Oh, I'll add an automatic parachute," is fine, but that's another subsystem you have to test, and a few more ounces that you'd rather use for batteries. If you opt to use motors that are all 33% stronger than required (so you can slowly descend if one fails) you've just signed up for heavier motors that draw more current, which means more batteries...

As a systems engineer, if someone came to me and asked my company to make a drone that could meet those specs, I'd fight tooth and nail to leave captive cable systems in the trade space, because they're in an entirely different category in terms of how much camera gear I can bring with me for how long.


sauce