Drone shows are replacing fireworks for summer celebrations. They’re safer and more environmentally friendly but complicated to program and run. A recent preprint paper proposes an algorithmic solution that can take some technical challenges out of drone operators’ hands and give engineers more creative control. Host Rachel Feltman speaks with researchers Mac Schwager, an associate professor at the aeronautics and astronautics department at Stanford University, and Eduardo Montijano, an associate professor at the department of computer science and systems engineering at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, about their work and what it would take to move the algorithm from theory to the skies.

Recommended reading:

Read the research team’s paper, which was presented at a 2024 workshop:

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-91813-1_6

And released as a preprint:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15899

How Do Fireworks Actually Work? Here’s the Explosive Science

https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/the-science-of-fireworks/

E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover!

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Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Alex Sugiura with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

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