Name: The Technology Behind Firework-Launching Drones
Uploaded: 2025-07-04T04:01:00Z
Duration: 9 min 40 s
Description: Pyro drones are transforming firework displays by launching pyrotechnics in intricate patterns with millisecond accuracy. WSJ explores the technology behind how quadcopter fleets are changing aerial displays.

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Pyro drones are transforming firework displays by launching pyrotechnics in intricate patterns with millisecond accuracy. WSJ explores the technology behind how quadcopter fleets are changing aerial displays. Photo: Sky Elements

https://m.wsj.net/video/20250702/66e6155c-f175-453b-ac8f-1e67bc77ae4b/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Pyro drones are transforming firework displays by launching pyrotechnics in intricate patterns with millisecond accuracy. WSJ explores the technology behind how quadcopter fleets are changing aerial displays.

The Technology Behind Firework-Launching Drones

Narrator: This is something that can't be achieved with fireworks alone. It's made using Pyro drones, hundreds of tiny explosive-laden quadcopters piloted to an exact formation in space firing pyrotechnics in perfect choreography. But while these shows may look simple, getting to this point has taken extensive engineering complex flight plans and a fair amount of trial and error.

Anytime you attach any sort of explosive device to anything, it creates an additional level of risk.

What are the things that are gonna cause a show to go wobbly? And the list is endless, you know.

Narrator: And running a drone show isn't without its challenges.

Participant: Watch it. Wooah!

Narrator: This is "The Tech Behind Pyro Drones." To see exactly how a Pyro drone show comes together, ariel display company Sky Elements invited the Wall Street Journal to a test of a new show, where each drone can carry up to six fireworks. The drones its using are these $1,500 customized quadcopters that are made in South Korea. In addition to their usual RGB light for illuminations, each drone is kitted out with a pyrotechnic amount for it and a firing module.

We'll use what they call close proximate fireworks. So it's a very specific type of firework that's usually designed to be used inside.

Narrator: The pyrotechnics are attached to each drone using these 3D printed mounts, each pyro then has an electronic match attached to it that's ignited from this firing module launching the firework, the moment it receives the signal to do so.

You'll load the script onto the remote. It'll say, you know, at one minute, 10 seconds, Module number one, queue number one, you're gonna fire.

Narrator: Each of those firing cues are relayed to the firing module with millisecond accuracy, meaning designers can create a chasing cascade of launches like this, but for that time into work, each drone needs to be in a precise location. So to map out the display, drone show providers choreograph their flights in 3D animation software. For safety, each drone needs to be kept at least six and a half feet apart. But maintaining that distance as the show moves requires thinking in three dimensions.

You could build a 3D model and then attach drones to the surface of that model. If I have a horse, I'm gonna have the horse's legs running. His tail's gonna be moving, his head's gonna be bobbing back and forth. We have to take all of that into consideration. And so if a horse's head moves, that drone is going to, you know, potentially collide with something. So we're gonna offset it into 3D space where the audience is never gonna see.

Narrator: Once the show is mapped out, certain drones are selected to be firework carriers.

Where within the design do we want the Pyro drones to be? If it's a giant 10 in the sky, do we want the 10 to be Pyro drones and make a 10 out of the Pyro drones?

The idea is to use the pyro to give the drone show moments of impact.

The biggest weakness of a drone show is it doesn't have a finale. When you're doing a firework display, usually you save the last 10 to 15% of the product to be shot in the last 20 seconds. Well, with the drone show, I can't just send up more drones, so having the ability to have pyrotechnics really takes it to the next level.

Narrator: But adding explosives affects the design of the show, as weight, thrust, and firing direction all have to be considered,

We don't want to be dropping sparks on top of another drone, so we have to really pay attention to what's directly below each of the drones as they fire their pyro.

Narrator: To solve this, drones with pyro are often separated out in a 3D plane from other drones in the show. Once the animation is locked in, Brian's team then has to use an algorithm to figure out the safest and most efficient path for the drones to fly between their formations, ensuring they avoid crossing with each other or hitting potential obstacles. It's why you'll often see this twinkling cluster between formations. That's the algorithm at work. Finally, the show itself is all contained within this bounding box, a geofence that's designed to instantly shut down any drones that malfunction and attempt to leave the area.

And then I can know if I'm lifting drones, I'm going to avoid this light pole here. You know, if I'm taking off in a football field, there's a light pole right next to where I'm taking off.

Narrator: And that's important because crashing drones, especially ones that could soon be carrying up to six fireworks, each, is a real concern.

Reporter: Three minutes in, spectators started shouting that drones were falling from the sky.

Narrator: See, unlike consumer drones, light show drones don't have any sensors or cameras. That means that this drone only knows its own flight path and has no information telling it that it's part of a show or surrounded by hundreds of other drones or near a crowd.

What they do have is a very sophisticated GPS. It's called an RTK GPS.

Narrator: That GPS system combines satellite data with that of a local base station to provide centimeter accurate positioning, allowing the drones to fly in precise patterns. But even this can be a fault.

If you jam the communications to the drones, they're not going to get that precise signal. They're gonna be accurate to six feet. Well, when you have a bunch of drones that are only accurate to six feet, they're likely to hit each other or likely to have problems.

Narrator: And even with safety devices like geofences in place, mistakes can and do happen. In Orlando, on December 21st, 2024, an incident occurred at a Sky Elements Show, where some of the drones they were using, not pyrotechnic ones, collided, fell from the sky and raced towards the audience, seriously injuring a minor according to an NTSB report. The investigation said that some of the drones hadn't received their final flight paths, and that the show center point was not completely aligned. Sky Elements said that after some of the drones collided, their GPS systems malfunctioned causing them to fly away. Since the incident, the company says it has improved its show operations software and its workflow protocols, including adding individual geofence bubbles to each drone.

If that drone varies more than a couple of feet, we immediately turn the motors off.

Narrator: But the event has led to the industry as whole, including Sky Elements, trying to develop unified safety standards.

That was sort of the catalyzing event.

Narrator: Nils Thorjussen is a drone show technology provider who has helped spearhead a group attempting to come up with safety standards for all drone shows. He says that despite the fact that there are established and well run players like Sky Elements, there are also many younger companies.

It's been a little bit wild west in the drone show industry. I mean, people buy 50, 100 drones and get some software, and they can quickly get in over their heads. They have to learn by making all the same mistakes that everybody else has already made.

Narrator: Nils believes one standard should be that drones have multiple layers of redundancy for their navigation, GPS, and power systems. However...

It's tricky. You can't have limitless redundancy.

Narrator: Part of the challenge around creating universal standards is that Pyro Drone shows are very new. The FAA only gave clearance for them in 2024. And as such, many industry players have established different ways of doing things like choosing whether to keep the pyro firing mechanism separate from its flight system as Sky Elements does, or unifying it as Verge Aero does.

I don't wanna risk the ability of not turning off the pyro tactics, because if they're on the ground and they go off, that might cause a fire.

Obviously, you know, we think the way we're doing things is the best, right, and everybody's gonna have their biases.

Narrator: The final step is to set up the physical show, a lengthy process, given that hundreds of drones have to be charged, loaded with specific pyro and laid out on a grid. Having been set back for several hours by heavy rain, the team began unpacking.

We've got 600 Pyro drones and a large team. I think we've got probably 15 people over there. Right now, we are attaching all the pyro to all the drones. We're making sure that the right device goes onto the right drone. We're probably maybe an hour or so out.

Narrator: Allocating over 1000 individual pyro shots in a perfect sequence to 600 specific drones spread out at random across a grid isn't a quick process. See, with RGB drones, it doesn't matter which drone goes where as the lights can be assigned and switched. But with physical pyro.

The show turns much more complicated because I have to specify that a specific drone is in a specific spot at a specific time, because I have attached a specific piece of pyro to it.

Narrator: To figure out which drones to attach pyro to, Brian's team uses software to roll the show back to its starting grid, but with up to six pyros on each drone, it's not easy.

Okay, let me skip fill this one. Fill, fill, skip, fill, skip, skip okay.

Okay.

Next row.

Narrator: As night falls, the show launch window comes and goes.

We never try to do anything this complex. We do that, you break stuff.

Narrator: By midnight, the team are still hours away from being able to launch and so decide to cancel.

We missed our window to be able to do it. And so to be mindful to the community and everyone around us, we decided to pull the plug.

Narrator: The main issue, the sheer volume of pyro that needed to be sequentially loaded into the drones.

And we learned what we had done was way too difficult to even figure out where to put things. We thought we had it in a nice orderly fashion, but it wasn't enough. Maybe we were a bit too ambitious, but that's what Sky Elements does. We're wanting to push the envelope.

Narrator: So while it may have taken around two years for Sky Elements to secure FAA approval for Pyro drone shows it could be a little while longer before the shows become more commonplace.

The Complex Engineering Behind Firework-Firing Drones

The Tech Behind delves into the complex engineering, computing, science, and algorithms that power our favorite technology.

The Complex Engineering Behind Firework-Firing Drones

The Tech Behind

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