It’s a giant RC with air tanks. It’s wasn’t human operated and technical specs aren’t public, so things like weight are unknown.
The engineering aspect that is interesting is the air canisters. The claim is they’re self replenishing so my curiosity is how that’s achieved with enough power to support car acrobatics.
The “self-replenishing” part is actually a super impressive feat of engineering.
Using satellite telemetry the vehicle identifies a ground station. Then using local compute, the vehicle navigates to the ground station. Finally a robotic arm attaches an air-tight fluid pump to the vehicle to exchange propellant.
I mean, that is how it will work when Tesla definitely brings this to market. Right now they just have Pedro filling the CO2 canisters by-hand, but the rest is for sure on the way.
/s if it wasn’t obvious. This thing is just a large lightweight RC car with some compressed air canisters and microcontrollers. Even if the air canisters replenished on-board, that’s not new, that’s just an air compressor you can buy at Home Depot. Most impressive feat of engineering is getting the weight calibration right for balance, and drones solved that decades ago.
Self replenishing air compressors have existed for decades.
I don't want to shit on the probably hard working engineers, but, film studios have been building way more impressive stuff for decades
They have, I’m just doubtful they even used them here since they’d have no need and it would have forced compromise between weight, noise, and efficiency. If they actually used a compressor on-board then it was probably just to technically tick a box so they aren’t technically lying about “self-replenishing” but I’d easily bet $50 they’re still swapping whole canisters in practice just because the output volume isn’t great.
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u/The_Beardly 5h ago
It’s a giant RC with air tanks. It’s wasn’t human operated and technical specs aren’t public, so things like weight are unknown.
The engineering aspect that is interesting is the air canisters. The claim is they’re self replenishing so my curiosity is how that’s achieved with enough power to support car acrobatics.