Drone Racing: FPV and Telepresence

Strap on a pair of fatshark goggles, and suddenly you aren’t standing in a field anymore—you are flying at 90mph through a neon gate. FPV (First Person View) Drone Racing is exploding in popularity, blending the twitch reflexes of video games with the adrenaline of motorsports.

But FPV isn’t just a sport; it’s a window into the future of robotics: Telepresence.

Seeing Through the Robot’s Eyes

In FPV racing, you don’t look at the drone; you look at what the drone sees. You are mentally projecting yourself into the machine. In advanced competitive robotics (and real-world bomb disposal or surgical robots), this is standard. You often cannot see your robot directly because it is behind a wall or on the other side of the field. You have to drive via the camera feed.

However, moving from “Line of Sight” (looking at the bot) to “FPV” (looking at a screen) introduces the biggest enemy of engineering: Latency (Lag).

The 20-Millisecond War

Light is fast. Electronics are slow. When a photon hits the drone’s camera:

1. Capture: The sensor digitizes the image.
2. Encode: The processor compresses it (H.264/H.265).
3. Transmit: The radio sends it through the air.
4. Receive: The goggles catch the signal.
5. Decode: The goggles turn it back into an image.
6. Display: The screen lights up.

In drone racing, if this process takes more than 30 milliseconds, you crash. Your brain cannot react in time. In robotics, if your camera lag is too high, you overshoot the target. This teaches you about Bandwidth Management.

• You can’t stream 4K video. It’s too much data.
• You have to downgrade to 480p or even 360p.
• You lower the bitrate.
• You optimize the signal to get that “real-time” fluid feel.

Disconnected from Reality (Situational Awareness)

The strangest part of FPV/Telepresence is the dissociation. Your body is stationary, but your eyes say you are moving.

• Motion Sickness: New pilots often fall over.
• Tunnel Vision: You can see forward, but you have no peripheral vision. You can’t see who is sneaking up behind you.

This is why robotics teams use Sensor Fusion. Since the camera is limited, we add:

• Distance Sensors (LiDAR/Ultrasonic): To tell us if we are about to back into a wall.
• Rear-View Mirrors: Software “Radars” on our dashboard that show nearbly obstacles. We give the driver a “Heads Up Display” (HUD) like a fighter pilot, overlaying critical data on top of the video feed.

The Future of Work

Why learn this? Because “Drone Pilot” and “Robot Operator” are becoming blue-collar jobs.

• Inspection: Checking wind turbines for cracks without climbing them.
• Agriculture: Spraying crops with massive drones.
• Medicine: Surgeons operating on patients in different countries using the Da Vinci robot.
• Space: Driving rovers on the Moon.

The skill of manipulating a machine through a screen—translating your hand movements into robot actions miles away—is the literacy of the 21st century. If you can fly a TinyWhoop through a hoop, you have the hand-eye coordination to drive a multimillion-dollar rover.