Drones and airsoft useage?

[luke213]

Hey guys and gals, recently a good buddy of mine came up to the area for some other projects and ended up playing airsoft that weekend with me. Well come to find out he had one of the Parrot Bebop drones in his car so we decided to use it to film some of the game. Afterwards I was very impressed at the video quality because of the stabilization very interesting stuff.

Here is the video I tossed together after that first game, keep in mind we really didn't plan ahead here. It was more less "hey we have this cool piece of tech, let's try and make some interesting video with it". But also we're in tree cover which was a huge challenge for me flying the drone since before shooting this I had a whole 6 or so minutes of practice before dodging the branches;) Either way it was very interesting and I think could be used to some good effect to compliment some of the airsoft video's out there by mixing it with gopro footage. I also should mention this was "staged" at least the part filmed, it was after some of the guys left already and without much planning the way guys move and don't take cover etc;) Well it was a test;)



So I'm wondering who else has been playing with this tech for taking airsoft video, and possibly mixing it with gopro footage etc. Also what are you using for hardware? After this was taken I actually got a care package from that same buddy with all hid "old" drone bits and parts and got enough parts and pieces to build out an AR drone 2.0 well actually two of them though one camera isn't functional the rest of the chassis is. I'm considering mounting something like a Mobius to that one for a little better video quality. That said the AR drone is not a stabilized platform so the video certainly won't be as good as that I did in the video above as far as smooth camera movement.

I've also got the idea that once I get this all together it could be used in a larger game for recon type of applications. Right now with the Bebop and the skycontroller it's got a range of around 2km according to specs, likely less with obstructions but still far enough to be interesting. It's fairly easy to fly above the level anyone would have a real chance of shooting it down, and honestly I'm not too concerned with that. If someone can't be trusted to not shoot at equipment which isn't in play and is against the rules so to speak I don't think they have any place playing airsoft. I'm not really planning to bring this to any games beyond the ones I control so if someone shoots it, they won't be playing with the group anymore. With the limited battery life of these drones as well and longish charge times it does limit itself to pretty much a 8-10 minute flight every hour or so depending on how many batteries you've got setup. The AR drones I've been rebuilding are running fairly standard 3s 1300mah lipo cells from Hobby King so it wouldn't be a stretch to get several and be able to run more frequently etc depending on the game.

But that's more of a secondary idea, primarily I'm thinking they could make some interesting in game footage. I did do a bunch of video at the game we did recently at our semi normal field of the sawmill which I'm still working out time to snip together and make a semi cohesive video from including the gopro footage. But I'd love to hear what anyone else has been doing in the same area, as well as ideas from other guys on what they think of the use of drones either for video, or augmenting gameplay in some way.

Take care!

Luke

[Canto]

I would support drone usage, I think it's a unique aspect and modern twist on airsoft. Footage for events or aerial reconnaissance would be very cool.

Obviously land owners would need to be consulted prior to usage of any kind, which I don't foresee many issues with that. As for gameplay (recon) use, you can't stop people from shooting it out of the sky.

I've actually been approached by two different people for using it at events.

[luke213]

As for gameplay (recon) use, you can't stop people from shooting it out of the sky.

I hear that allot in threads talking about it but I really think that's just not a real argument. In airsoft we're having to wrap our heads around allot of things that aren't realistic. IE just pretty much everything but the look of our guns;) So we're emulating allot of things in the real world, if the drone is a real drone, then it would be too high to hit with regular firearms anyways. But also I think saying people can't shoot it, is honestly a fair way to do things. If there was someone who stumbled into the airsoft game area wearing no protective gear, it would be accepted practice to call a cease fire and of course not shoot them. That's a rule for safety, but I think the game rules themselves need to be followed in the same manner. Really I guess I view it like this, if someone told not to shoot the drone does shoot the drone, I see that as the same as someone who doesn't call their hits. If it's a rule of the game and your not following it for whatever reason, then there will be a problem.

Now all of that said I'm still not too worried about it, when we played that last game with them, my same buddy who has less interest in not breaking his equipment than I would. Decided it would be fun to have all the guys shoot at the drone while it was flying around. After much shooting and a few grazing hits there was actually only one that hit the hull enough to embed into it, and the few that grazed off props didn't even mess up anything in the flight. The only way I could tell it was hit in the props was afterwards looking at the slight white BB marks here and there. I'd say out of around 1,000 BB's shot at it, likely had 3-4 hits total none that brought it down and this was at around 30ft from the shooters. If I were using it for recon I'd likely be around 120ish foot above ground and that distance with a moving target would be very difficult to hit, especially with hopup effecting things oddly shooting nearly up. I'll do some testing but I generally suspect the chances of a hit in those circumstances would be nearly unheard of.

Take care!

Luke

[Snarf]

I've thought about airsoft drone usage quite a bit, ever since I saw a related thread on airsoftmechanics a while ago. I fully support the use of drones, whether they're normal planes or quadcopters. However, ff they can't shoot at infantry, players shouldn't be able to shoot at the aircraft IMO. Maybe just have a capturable SAM site as an area denial for the drone, if it actually has strategic significance. Either that, or you just have to hide in the woods where the drone can't see you. Honestly, I don't think a drone should ever be shot at, because if you do take it down, you have just created the biggest possible aircraft-related safety hazard (having it falling onto somebody).

When you get down to the technical aspect, I think a long-endurance plane would be much more practical than a quadcopter, for the simple reason of operating time. There's a reason that Predator drones are fixed wing aircraft rather than x-copters. Of course, any sort of aerial recon has the potential to be super cool and add a lot to a milsim experience.

As a side note, the airsoftmechanics thread I referred to was actually talking about airsoft air support, in which the aircraft would actually be armed. Now this throws a whole bunch of new aspects to discuss, but I think figuring out the gameplay mechanics of a simple recon drone would be a good start.

[Combat Junkies Airsoft]

I purchased an AR parrot drone for use as an in game UAV drone for surveillance as it has the capability to live stream the footage to an Ipad or smart phone using its own WiFi. So far I have only had the opportunity to use it for capturing game play footage as I've found three major draw backs to making it effective. 1. WiFi; its very limited in its range to truly be effective for real time intelligence. 2. High center of gravity; This particular drone has a very high center of gravity which means it is very easily effected by gusts of wind. A strong gust can easily cause the drone to loose stability and lift leading to a crash. 3. Size; This model is fairly large with the rotor protector installed. It makes it challenging trying to find a way to carry it out on the field and still be combat effective. 

Here is the footage I managed to capture at TC in Charlotte.

[luke213]

Is yours an AR drone 2 or 1? From the video looks like the one despite that fact there isn't a whole lot of difference between the two a little better video and a few other perks to the 2.0. Really I've got those 2 AR Drone 2.0 drones and they are both a bit buggy and unstable at this point, hoping to find an older version of the firmware that fixes some of the issues I've got but I'm not holding my breath.

They are both good and stable when flying, but the software flakes out and causes serious crashing issues from time to time. I've actually built a controller for it out of some kydex, a 7in. Nexus tablet and an old Logitech gamepad. Then using a hacked APK for the tablet that enables the controller I'm flying mine with the analog sticks which makes control a heck of allot easier. I'm planning on slapping a WIFI repeater on the kydex apparatus along with a uni antenna to see what sort of range I can pull. I've heard allot of reports of guys doing that getting 1000+ feet out of them with that sort of setup so we'll see how that goes.

Agreed though in stock form they are limited range and performance wise as well as video quality. Mine will do passable 720p, but it's not great. Works fine for controlling the drone. I'm planning on modding the camera to face down at around a 10 degree angle to make filming a bit easier to keep people in frame, as well I'm planning on mounting a Mobius camera on there in conjunction with the integrated camera to bring up the video quality. I'm just planning on making a mount and making them face as close as I can to the same direction so I can use the onboard camera as a viewfinder of sorts for the Mobius to tell where it's facing and what it's recording. I think that combination will do fair gameplay footage, not as good as some of the newer quads but passable.

Then for recon, I should have the longer range but it's still not very portable in the size department. I considered building a backpack/bag that would be a hard sided case that would house the drone and equipment that you could open, fly, put back on the field.

Also something to note, the protector for the rotors is for indoor flight only according to parrot, so using it outdoor can cause some serious issues in the wind from what I've read. I'm not sure what the overall effect is since I don't have an indoor body for either of mine, one came with not much of one at all, and the other has an outdoor only body. So if your having trouble with the wind I'd pull that, slap on the outdoor body and try flying that way it might help. That said I've crashed with just the outdoor body on a bunch of times while tuning these things and replacing broken things and seldom does my crashing actually cause any problems. I'd say I'm on 10+ crashes on the props I'm running right now and one of these days I'll balance and straighten a new set to put on there;)

Take care!

Luke

[Combat Junkies Airsoft]

It's a 2.0 and make sure you change the quality on YouTube. For some reason it defaults at 360p for this video also out of curiosity I choose to let YouTube apply auto stabilization. I won't do that on the next video. As for which body to fly with I actually prefer the indoor body for two reasons. 1. It protects the rotors and master rotor gears from damage during a crash. I found this out the hard way by crashing the first week I had it from roughly 50+ ft up down to concrete... It mashed the teeth of one of the gears pretty good but was able to repair it with a small file. 2. I find the extra weight actually adds a bit of stability and keeps some of the cross wind from effecting lift.

[luke213]

Interesting on the indoor hull, I don't have one to try so that's just what I've heard, I do know it's heavier but I'm not sure by how much. Really though with a Mobius camera it's probably around the same weight. I'm also running non standard batteries because I didn't want to buy the parrot ones and spend more on less. So I went with a 30c 1300mah 3s lipo and wired the drone to deans so it's common with everything I run in airsoft rather than the whole backwards connector compared to airsoft deal with the existing batteries. I'm considering going up in battery though since there are quite a few reports of guys running 2000+mah batteries in them.

This morning I actually found my old repeater that I've gotta wire up to my controller, got it paired and setup with a test before it's mounted and it looks pretty good. Enough so that I actually put the drone outside my pole barn and still had a connection through the steel walls which is far better than what I was getting just off the tablet. So we'll see how that effects overall range but I'm hoping for good results there.

So we'll see I'm still thinking about how to use it for airsoft, but first I've just gotta get it functional and reliable then work on integrating it into games. But since they were used pretty hard, I've got allot of small stuff to fix;) Thankfully I've got a box full of props, gears, shafts and a few spare boards. So I've got allot of parts to fix things so likely this will keep going until I get them working;)

Luke

[Snarf]

I'm not too familiar with the model you guys have, but 1000 ft. sounds pretty short in terms of range. I met a drone hobbyist last summer who could send his out for miles theoretically. The battery life on the quadcopter wasn't the greatest, but he showed me some videos from his RC plane that could just go on and on, miles out. They both had backup autoilots (and fully autonomous modes). I know the builds weren't even that expensive (relatively). They were mostly cookie-cutter kits on Hobbyking that he put together from instructions on forums. I think it was around $300 for everything minus the camera.

The footage you guys are getting is still really cool though. Even 1000 ft. range can be very useful at the village at Hell's Survivors or at most of the fields at No Limits.

[luke213]

Well the trouble with these setups aside from the coding of their software which is crap in my opinion;) Is that they run on Wifi rather than normal RC frequencies. So rather than having to buy a full transmitter control type of setup you can control it via the touchscreen on the phone or tablet. Which is pretty cool, but the range suffers allot. These are also getting a bit long in the tooth they originally sold for around $300, they were the second version and the first version was I believe the first commercial drone that had a camera on it(could be wrong but I've heard that). So the tech is a bit behind the times on what the new stuff is capable of distance wise, as well as some of the other features.

I've got a GPS for mine(which is terrible) and should make it capable of flight plans but I haven't seen much use to that if I'm honest. A, it's really hard to trust that much money flying around without any control for me, and B. It's fully reliant on tech that honestly isn't often very good. Return to home via GPS on most drones takes the most direct path without taking into account altitude or obstructions. So if your flying in a field great, if you flying over tree's expect to play find the drone for a few hours;) So there is allot of promise in the tech itself but it's young and the software hasn't caught up with the advertising lingo yet, IE the features they tout aren't often ready for the big screen.

It's interesting, 1,000ft isn't anything to write home about for a large field but when stock on the drone is around 50-100ft for most guys it's a big step up;) If I were willing to spend the money you can retrofit these for a conventional radio to get longer transmit ranges etc, but it's pretty spendy. Also like you mentioned you can build some interesting things with parts from China and do pretty well feature wise if you know the in's and out's of the system. I'm an utter newbie when it comes to RC flight of any variety, the first time I flew anything was about 5 minutes before that top video was recorded;) I'm researching and learning, but I also have a zero budget more less for this whole additional "hobby". So I don't anticipate anything will change there, these two I got for free I wouldn't have bought right now since I couldn't swing it. They just happened to fall in my lap and now I'm figuring out how to make use of them as best I can within their limitations.

Also for the 1,000ft. I'm figuring that's 3 times roughly the distance most AEG's can shoot so it should allot a flight from a semi near location to scout an area or base camp and then report via radio what you can see. Overall though I see this more as a flying tripod in the sky for getting game footage than a drone in the conventional sense. If I can push it into service in game I'll do it, but likely it will be more camera than anything else. And even within that I've got allot more work to do grafting a newer camera on it to get better footage since I'm not very happy with the stock footage compared to the newer stabilized platforms.

Luke