Move Over Fireworks—Drone Shows Are Taking to the Skies

Drone shows are replacing fireworks for summer celebrations.
They’re safer and more environmentally friendly but complicated to
program and run. A recent preprint paper proposes an algorithmic
solution that can take some technical challenges out of drone
operators’ hands and give engineers more creative control. Host
Rachel Feltman speaks with researchers Mac Schwager, an associate
professor at the aeronautics and astronautics department at
Stanford University, and Eduardo Montijano, an associate professor
at the department of computer science and systems engineering at
the University of Zaragoza in Spain, about their work and what it
would take to move the algorithm from theory to the skies.
Recommended reading: Read the research team’s paper, which was
presented at a 2024 workshop:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-91813-1_6 And
released as a preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15899 How Do
Fireworks Actually Work? Here’s the Explosive Science
https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/the-science-of-fireworks/
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