The game of drones
Winning America’s Cup skipper Glenn Ashby was typically forthcoming, but not everyone was as keen (nor allowed) to speak to Rob Kothe as he dug into the rapid expansion of drone usage in every area of the sport now – from Oppi training to America’s Cup design. Which of course says plenty…
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revolution is currently taking place in both high- performance racing and coaching as well as in tech- nical areas such as foil design and rig develop-
ment. Drone-delivered video certainly helped win the 35th America’s Cup in Bermuda and after playing a useful role in the run-up to Rio 2016 the game has ramped up dramatically as Olympic sailing teams prepare for Tokyo 2020. Providing a different view of the field of
play, drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), primarily quadcopters, have become important coaching tools in most high-performance sports. Drone vision is being used in England for coaching among Premier League football teams and in rugby under head coach Eddie Jones, while in America in 2015 the FAA approved the use of drones in football (ie not soccer!) practice sessions, with the Dallas Cowboys leading the way. Sam Greenfield was the first Volvo
Ocean Race onboard reporter to fly a drone during the 2014-2015 event and he then went on to full-time involvement in the America’s Cup, flying multiple camera drones in Bermuda for the USA Defender Oracle. Greenfield tells the story: ‘It was during the Abu Dhabi to China leg. A trial by fire, I waited until we were drifting in the middle of the Indian Ocean with zero wind and just worked it up a few knots at a time from there up to a max of 15kt.
‘With Oracle I was originally hired as
part of the media team, starting in early 2016. That quickly transitioned into a coach assistant role, working alongside the team’s chief sailing coach Philippe Presti. ‘I started using a Phantom 3 Pro, then
upgraded to the 4 Pro. The goal was to try to capture every manoeuvre from the air and then time-synch the video. The boats were going 40kt downwind and 30 upwind. I could stay with the boat down- wind in all conditions but in winds above 18 upwind it just wasn’t possible. ‘Every single evening we would then cut
together a reel of the best 10 gybes, the worst three and the same for the tacks and they would email it off to every member of the campaign.’ By contrast Emirates Team New Zealand,
armed with more sophisticated drone vision equipment, shot over the full windspeed range and were able to use the results not just as a coaching tool but crucially for their AC50 design and development process. That vision came courtesy of Nick
Bowers, an American pro-kite sailor, doing sailing event video coverage as a hobby, who was using a Phantom 2 drone with a GoPro camera which had the standard slightly fisheye lens replaced with a variety of rectilinear lenses that removed the GoPro’s inherent distortion. Bowers takes up the joystick: ‘Putting
new lenses in the GoPro meant I could simulate a 50mm lens on a traditional 35mm camera, whereas on an off-the-shelf
DJI all-inclusive camera system even to this day the lens is way too wide an angle, giving unhelpful distortion that prevents meaningful analysis of sail shapes and rigs. ‘Filming Moths at the US Nationals, I
started to get an idea technically of what might be needed for the future – using multi-rotor technology to film sailing with much greater precision. Speed was the issue with all the foiling boats, but particu- larly the Cup boats – upwind you can have apparent windspeeds of well over 60mph and at the time there was just nothing off the shelf that could do that. ‘A drone creates downforce as it articu-
lates. In forward flight if you are chasing something you must articulate further and further forward so your angle of attack is increasing. The existing top-of-the-range commercial equipment was very much speed limited; even in moderate winds the Phantom 4 DJI Inspire, in fact any of the commercially available drones, cannot keep pace with an America’s Cup boat and when they do keep pace with a Cup boat in the light-air spectrum you are at full throttle… which is not a great way to run. ‘So I had designed a custom high-speed
drone and patented that in 2015, an air foil-shaped vertical configuration. My goal was to be flying with full control at 55-60 miles an hour. With the same motors and propellers that would do 35 off the shelf, mine did 72mph… Pretty quickly I realised we were America’s Cup ready. ‘I finally caught up with Glenn Ashby,
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