Cinematic Drone Sony Airpeak Tested in a Wind Tunnel

New details

Sony con­tin­ues to improve its first Airpeak cin­e­mat­ic drone, which was first announced at CES2021. The project is kept as secret as pos­si­ble and no oth­er infor­ma­tion has been received since the demon­stra­tion of the pro­to­type. Today, the devel­op­er broke a lunch of silence and pre­sent­ed to the com­mu­ni­ty a video of the wind resis­tance tests of the unique machine, con­duct­ed by the Japan Aero­space Explo­ration Agency (JAXA), and also talked about the lat­est devel­op­ments affect­ing the drone’s propul­sion sys­tem.

JAXA Wind Tunnel

The JAXA wind tun­nel can gen­er­ate arti­fi­cial air­flow at a con­stant speed. Accord­ing to the devel­op­er, the pur­pose of the tests was to see the con­se­quences that a drone might encounter when fly­ing in windy weath­er, as well as to deter­mine the max­i­mum thresh­old for wind resis­tance. The test results showed that the pro­to­type was able to main­tain sta­ble flight in wind speeds of around 20 m/s — in oth­er words, this is a wind so strong that it would be dif­fi­cult for an ordi­nary per­son to stand upright.

See how it looked dur­ing the test:

Power plant and flight controller

A well-cho­sen drone propul­sion sys­tem, usu­al­ly con­sist­ing of pro­pellers, motors and ESCs (elec­tron­ic speed con­trollers), should pro­vide enough thrust to main­tain a sta­ble and steady flight in high wind con­di­tions. Accord­ing to the devel­op­er, Airpeak’s propul­sion sys­tem is opti­mized to ensure sta­ble flight even in high winds, with an arse­nal of speed con­trollers designed to superbly con­trol high-per­for­mance and pow­er­ful brush­less motors, each of which works in tan­dem with light, high-per­for­mance and respon­sive 17-inch pro­pellers.

How­ev­er, in the nat­ur­al world, the direc­tion of the wind is con­stant­ly chang­ing, which means that sim­ply accel­er­at­ing the pro­pellers will not be enough. Accord­ing­ly, it is very impor­tant to devel­op a flex­i­ble and respon­sive con­trol sys­tem that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly responds well to the envi­ron­ment and pro­vides full con­trol in all sit­u­a­tions. To achieve this, Sony engi­neers devel­oped a unique propul­sion sys­tem and flight con­troller from the ground up, and test­ed the tech­nol­o­gy in chal­leng­ing envi­ron­ments, step by step to achieve the opti­mal lev­el of flight sta­bil­i­ty for Airpeak.