A loyal reader of Electronics Weekly contacted us to ask how the various spectacular New year drone displays work – particularly the Singapore one.

Only based on half an hour’s Googling, here is a tiny bit of information* on these events.

The crucial fact* appears to be that there is no drone-to-drone comms. Instead, all navigation is through carefully choreographed positional commands to individual drones, with each drone equipped with GNSS (GPS, Beidou, ….) reception, with local enhancement (possibly using ‘RTK’, which uses extra carrier phase information).

The drones at multiple Chinese displays appear to be GhostDrones from Ehang – which can be bought by the public, in which form they are specified to hover with 1m horizontal accuracy, and 20cm vertically.

Ehang set up a partner company (Egret Media Technology) to design and control such drone displays.

Control during a display appears to live be from a central computer on the ground, over 2.4GHz point-to-multi-point comms. Ehang claims 1.5ms distance between drones is possible during a display.

Left: Long exposure photo of 1,000 Ehang drones taking off in Februrary 2017, according to it, beating Intel’s 500 drone record set in Germany the year before. Ignore the fixed tower on the right.

Intel got it back at the Korean Winter Olympic games in 2018, with 1,218 ‘Shooting Star’ drones. Then in the same year Guinness confirmed Ehang achieving a 1374 drone record display over the city of Xi’an.

The firm is also working on a people-carrying drone taxi.

* fact-check everything yourself if this information is important to you as none of it has been confirmed from second sources. If you find mistakes, do comment below and we will correct the article.

Another synchronised drone record was claimed at the dawn of 2020, by Singapore/UK company SkyMagic for a swarm of just under 200 which launched fireworks as they flew over the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah.