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You may have heard of the Drone Racing League (DRL) before. It's a Formula 1-esque competition that pits elite drone pilots against each other. They wear goggles to fly in first-person view and race their drones at speeds of 90 mph and higher, taking hairpin turns, threading the needle through tight spaces, and performing aerial somersaults.
For its next act, the league wants to put AI in the cockpit.
DRL → IRL
"My job is to bring a shared fantasy to life," CTO Ryan Gury told me during a recent visit to DRL's HQ. He defines DRL as "a technology company" that's creating a new type of racing from scratch. Not too long ago, the idea of "high performance drones flying multi-mile, three-dimensional [tracks]" was science fiction.
Not just a tech company
- Manufacturing: DRL builds identical drones with specialized radio systems. Its latest aircraft, the Racer4, goes 0–90 mph in under a second. Here's one up close. DRL brings 600 drones to each race because so many crash (obviously the best part).
- Competition: Each season has a series of different "Levels," aka race venues. They range from an indoor Vegas amusement park to the Arizona Diamondbacks's Phoenix stadium to a BMW museum in Munich.
- Entertainment: Roughly 90 million viewers across 90 countries have tuned into races on NBC Sports, Twitter, Sky Sports, and other platforms.
May the best neural net win
DRL is bringing its drones to the showdown of our times—human vs. machine. It recently launched the AI Robotic Racing (AIRR) circuit and the AlphaPilot competition with Lockheed Martin. Culled from over 420 teams, nine finalists are jockeying to win the $1 million prize.
"The competitors are up against each other's math and algorithms," Gury said. "We're giving them the most advanced autonomous hardware that you can find on the globe." Gury projects autonomous drones will beat the world's best human pilots in 2023.
Zoom out: Drone racing is definitely niche, dwarfed in participation rates and viewership by traditional sports and e-sports. Even if it doesn't take off with the masses, you can probably expect to see some of DRL's tech commercialized.