Are You Ready To Be Freaked Out With Flying Drone Billboards From Aerotain?

Skye Aero is a project to build 10-foot helium-filled balloons, with small propellers attached to give better control than your average blimp. The benefits are a much bigger aircraft—useful when you want to advertise to people—and one that won’t crash the second it loses power, or bumps into anyone.

The Skye is a 3-meter-diameter controllable balloon that’s filled with helium for buoyancy. Dotted around the surface are propellers whose direction can be adjusted, spinning the balloon or moving it around as required. There’s also the option to add an internal projector to display moving images on the balloon’s skin. Skye has been used at events as a crowd-pleaser, but it can also be used a platform for aerial photography by adding cameras.

Moving away from its role as a replacement for the Goodyear Blimp, lighter-than-air drones are an interesting and underutilized concept. Provided they’re not filled with hydrogen, they offer increased safety for flying over crowds, and a much greater payload than traditional quadcopters. Hopefully, someone will find a better application for them than giant floating billboards.

Aerotain was established in September 2015 as Skye grew out of the founders’ work on a masters degree project at ETH Zurich. Aerotain were showing off a—sadly firmly tethered—Skye at CeBIT and I spoke to Andreas Schaffner, one of the company’s founders about the drone and the company’s plans for its future. At the moment Skye is offered as part of a complete service: “We’ll design and manufacture the hull—it doesn’t have to be a sphere, it can be anything—then we’ll come to the event and fly the thing,” says Schaffner.

In large part this full-service approach comes from the fact that Skye is currently too tricky to fly by anyone but a trained operator. But Schaffner says that they are working on an much more autonomous version that can be operated independently by customers. This will likely use ultra-wide-band radio beacons to locate each Skye in three-dimensional space, and the price point is expected to be somewhere in the tens of thousand of U.S. dollars.

With fully charged batteries, the Skye can fly for two to three hours, and can work both outdoors and indoors.  The height it can reach outdoors is largely limited by winds, so it typically stays within a maximum ceiling of 20 to 30 meters. The Skye can spin rapidly, making it suitable as platform for covering, say, racing events that follow a track. When moving from one place to another it has a top speed of about 15 to 20 kilometers per hour, but Schaffner says they are working to increase that in the next version as well.

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