When you see footage from the Drone Racing League's (DRL) first race, you may think it’s a special-effects sequence from a sci-fi movie. Little glowing spaceships zip around in tight formations, weaving through neon gates, slithering through tight tunnels, and occasionally smashing into walls at high speeds. But the videos aren’t computer-generated. The flying robots are real, and the footage is intended to be the public’s first glimpse at a new professional sports league.
The racing part is easy enough to explain: In each race, four hand-picked pilots navigate a complex course at speeds of up to 80 MPH, trying to finish the course in one of the fastest speeds of the group. There are a dozen pilots at the start of each competition. If they place in the top eight during the qualifying round, they advance to the semifinals. If they finish in the top four there, it’s on to the finals. And in that final round, the first-, second-, and third-place finishers receive points. Borrowing a page from NASCAR, if you accumulate enough points over the course of a five-race season, you compete in the championship race at the end of the season.
But viewers don’t have to care about the race to find the videos compelling. It's pure eye candy. There are plenty of injury-free crashes, Tron-like visuals, and white-knuckle moments to stoke casual interest in these videos. And while the league launched just a few weeks ago, it already has a global scope. Pilots from all over the world participate. The league scouts them through YouTube and Instagram videos, as well as mutual acquaintances in flying clubs.
There have been two league races thus far---a preseason event in an abandoned power plant in New York, and the first regular-season event in Miami’s Sun Life Stadium---attracting competitors from Brazil, Mexico, Australia, and across the United States. There’s no real “hotbed” for drone racing, DRL founder and CEO Nicholas Horbaczewski says. Drone fever is pretty much everywhere he looks.
“Usually, you have a regional interest in a sport and it grows from there,” says Horbaczewski. “This kind of racing originated in Australia, but now there’s some form of organized drone racing in most countries I’ve looked at.”
Wherever the viewers are watching, they’ll need to depend on DRL’s own videos to follow the races. Unless you’re a pilot, you may never see a race in person. DRL sees itself as an all-in-one sports league and professional production house; they have camera crews at each race and GoPros mounted to the front of each fast-flying rig for an immersive “cockpit” view. While viewers may gravitate to the league’s videos for a variety of reasons, pilots see the races as a chance for glory. Or at least bragging rights.
“The big prize for me isn’t the money, it’s really to come out here and show everybody I’m the top pilot and that’s it,” says Alex “Legacy” Walsh, a DRL pilot from New York. “As far as scouting other pilots, yeah I absolutely do that. I think some of the guys that are focused on being amazing acro-pilots..." he says, shaking his head. "If you’re concerned with doing backflips and making it look pretty, you’re not focused on being fast.”
DRL hasn’t said whether there will be cash prizes for the champion. The league does pay its pilots, although it hasn’t revealed just how much. It’s not enough for them to be DRL pilots 24/7---Walsh and fellow DRL pilot Steve Zoumas both have full-time jobs when they’re not competing. Horbaczewski says pilot sponsorships may become a reality down the line, and that’s one of the reasons the league is serious about creating well-produced videos.
“There hasn’t been organized [drone racing] with the kind of media we’re used to when we watch professional sports,” says Horbaczewski. “Until you’re producing that kind of media, you’re not going to bring in the sponsorship dollars and the media dollars that allow you to have people doing this for a living. To have teams and sponsored athletes. So we need to create the media that finds the fans, and then the fans bring the sponsorship.”
The league itself brings the drones---a fleet of about 100 of them for each event, so they can swap one in easily for the next heat when there’s a crash. While they’re similar to the drones the pilots build and use in their own time, the league says it’s important to even the playing field. Everyone uses the same drone, although the UAVs are refined from race to race.
“After each event, we take feedback from the pilots and we try to implement changes for the next revision,” says DRL director of product Ryan Gury. “Right now, we’re on racer 2.1.”
The vehicles get about two or three minutes of battery life, top out at around 80 MPH, and they’re actually a little heavier than the ones the pilots normally use. That’s largely due to the LEDs blanketing each craft; they’re not just there to look cool, the lights are key for visibility and pilot identification. Each drone’s LED color is matched up to a pilot, but it’s not like picking a ball in mini golf.
“You don’t get to pick your own color, but luckily I got purple,” says DRL pilot Steve “Zoomas” Zoumas. “Not my favorite color, but it’s my daughter’s favorite color. I was saying the whole time in Miami that she brought me luck.”
But even with lite-brite color schemes, fast-moving UAVs are impossible to see and control via line of sight. Each pilot wears FPV (first-person view) goggles, a headset that receives a real-time feed from the front of the drone as it’s flying around. That feed is designed for low-latency---an analog video feed delivered over a 5.8GHz frequency---while a separate GoPro on the front of each drone records HD footage for their post-produced videos. The DRL doesn’t just build its own drones; it also builds its own communications systems.
“The radios that go inside them, we have an advanced radio frequency infrastructure that we design for each venue so that the drones can fly far and still have stable signals,” says Ryan Gury, director of product of DRL. “We custom-design a small cell network for each venue---it’s like a tube of signal, almost.”
While the “Level 1” Miami race is in the books, the results of it aren’t yet known to the public. On February 22, a package of videos from the event will launch on the DRL’s website; a package from the preseason “Gates of Hell” event is already up. In March, the DRL will film its second race at an abandoned shopping mall in Los Angeles, an event it’s calling “LAPocalypse.” According to Gury and Horbaczewski, venues are scouted based on their 3D flight lines and aesthetic qualities, courses that will look really cool on camera. The big inspiration there is video games.
“When we’re talking to people about venues and what we want to do, they hearken back to their favorite video games,” says Horbaczewski. “Like there should be a snow level and a beach level and a city level, and that’s exactly what we want to do. We want to take all those environments and show how exciting it is to race in them.”
While pilots get a chance to test-fly the drones ahead of time, they don’t know what kinds of twists and vertical hairpin turns await them until they arrive at an event. “You’re going in blind,” explains pilot Zoumas. “They don’t give you any information on at all. They want it to be a mystery. You get to practice a couple of batteries, and then it’s qualifiers right away.”
The date and location for the finals hasn’t been announced yet, but don’t expect to see Horbaczewski himself competing in it.
“I am not a very good pilot,” Horbaczewski says. “My own inability reminds me every time I try to fly how exceptional the pilots are. I have a flight handle, but I’m not ready to announce it. It was given to me by the team, and I’m still deciding if it’s the right handle. They’ve become like fraternity names, where people hand them out.”
Horbaczewski says the goal for the league this year is to become less mysterious to the general public. He wants to raise awareness of the league’s existence, maybe get people to pick their favorite pilots, educate people through league-produced videos about how the races work, and build excitement leading up to the DRL’s first championship later this year.
