Mountain Biker Hits the Trail at Night Lit Only by a Drone

Holding onto a flashlight or wearing a headlamp may be too primitive for some activities of play and work, and night construction. This looks like it may become very interesting in time, as the drones become better able to track and focus on our activity.

I’ve read Skynet Cyberdyne Systems is investing a lot in this technology…

Definitely a cool concept, but not that practical for most applications except photoshoots. The flight time is probably less than 30 minutes (it’s hard to get longer flight time especially with weight of high power lights and extra batteries).

Metabo was also designing a drone to light a working area a few years back but I haven’t seen any updates about it. Gues they also ran into run time problems are something. It was suposed to follow the work(wo)man and light the area they’re working on.
Extra batteries will give more weight for sure but the lights can be made very light no? How much do LED’s, PCB and driver weigh? Couple of grams? should be no problem. Maybe they can use the propeller blades as active cooling in some way.

True, it would be a fun challenge, in any case. It really comes down to size; to get more flight time with payload you need to go with bigger/more propellers.

I wonder how remote wireless charging and a wrist remote control applied to the drone(s) that the individual needs to control would affect this, for instance on nighttime highway work when individual contractors and workers can have their personal collection of drones maximizing lighting and following them as they move and progress by the minute, for their specific needs, rather than just setting up a mass of less effective general area lighting for everyone.

How about the wife having her own security drone lighting her path on her evening exercise walk that is also a watch over camera/audio and alerting device in case she is endangered?

Watch out for that tree!

Wow, thats really cool, thanks for posting it.

though in this case there were also other cameras involved, illuminating terrain with a “follow me” drone, is also a very creative application

If this is the same guy ive seen before he has built a carbon frame and stuffed it with 8-12 100w COBs.

Think he sells the systems.

Using the props for cooling means they’ll provide less lift.

For this application, a winged drone would work better. Huge wingspan allows a heavier load and slower speeds. That could even work for stationary targets if the light could be aimed while the drone circles overhead, although that could be disorienting on the ground.

The versatility of movement in potentially confined spaces (trees and such around) is what allows the hovering aircraft to work in the video above. I don’t think a fixed wing aircraft would have enough maneuverability.

Very cool and creative. So was there someone else controlled the drone to follow the biker, or the drone has some sort of remote sensor which can be set to follow the biker without any manual control at all?

There is a guy controlling it.
He uses the drone to light up snowboarders and that kind of things.

This is his channel

I was thinking of nighttime rock climbing in the summer desert.

A little advancement in the current technologies of these lighting drones already in use, and then we can truly create daytime lighting conditions at night, for any and all activities.

What’d be sweet is a blimp drone. Rock crawling is pretty damn slow, and frequently stationary if you crawl with others as you should. A blimp would take much less power, but I expected a lot more than 25 minutes of flight time from these 13 and 20 foot rc blimps.

Daytime level lighting isn’t going to happen. The sun is amazing at what it does, and it’s incredibly difficult to match it over large areas. 200 lux average over an area sounds realistic though.

A fun video, but if the drone is behind the rider there will be a shadow in front of the bike and might disturb rider’s eye vision.

Yeah this is the first thing that came to mind.
Obviously the rider knows this trail like the back of his hand because the shadows in an environment like this (and with the light moving about) are horrible and disorienting in real life.

While it made for a neat video, it is wholly unpractical due to shadows alone.

Really wish they had used some high CRI led with a warmer tint. :sunglasses: