This is the funniest thing I saw this week. The idea that such a teensy drone could travel continental distances by hanging like a bat and recharge between runs. Sure solar gliders may keep aloft indefinitely too. But this one steals its juice!
Saying "this would be good for power line inspection drones" is true, but think bigger. Imagine if you could operate a fleet of delivery, surveillance, _whatever_ drones, with an already in place, widely distributed charging infrastructure that costs you nothing to build (but you pay for usage).
This is like in-flight refueling massively extending the operating range of jet aircraft.
You don't even need many drones for surveillance, just a few ones that deploy mini cameras using power lines both for power and communication. Cameras wouldn't need a battery to operate because they'd remain in place. No drive logic, no sensors, no motors, no batteries: much cheaper, just leave each one at regular distance and collect information remotely.
I should have probably left surveillance out because I was thinking less about panopticon style surveillance and more things like traffic patterns, crop growth, etc.
You're only thinking of the near certainty that a ubiquitous surveillance state would lead to government corruption, mass incarceration, general anxiety, the disruption of norms, and the end of many civil liberties. Try to focus on the upside potential for a small number of investors!
I imagine that billing for the electricity usage will be the power company’s distant second concern behind the mechanical stress of hanging unauthorized devices off a cable that was not designed with this scenario in mind.
As mentioned in another comment, these cables are designed to handle orders of magnitude more stress than a drone. (Think wind storms, entire flocks of birds, blown debris, etc)
If anything, this offers utility operators a massive new revenue opportunity. Drone fleets could pay to "perch" and recharge (giving unlimited range and ubiquitous charging), all just by reusing existing infrastructure. No need for a massive new infrastructure buildout, and "nothing left to take away" design.
Big future for whoever can successfully commercialize this.
It's not that simple: just because you add a safety margin on a construction element, doesn't mean you're allowed to use this safety margin.
For example if a chain has a certified Weight Limit Load of 1 T, it means it actually lifted 4 T (or 10 T if it's certified to lift people). This is because a lifting sling is tested in very controllable environment when it's new, whereas on a building site it will be subject to dynamical stress caused by winds, it will be hit, it will be used in various temperatures etc.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong: in case of power cables there might not be such a rigidly defined safety margin in law, and experts may figure out some assumptions, like the drones not operating during wind storms, in which the safety margin is more than needed - and therefore there's some spare capacity BEFORE the the actually needed safety margin.
But are they designed to carry those loads with a drone flock. They’ll also increase the received wind load. Unlikely to cause an issue but you still have to do the math to determine the decrease to the margin of safety
The cost of the electricity provided is negligible compared to the value of providing such a readily accessible and geographically available changing network. I wouldn't be surprised if the metered cost of the electricity itself isn't even factored in to the bill when charging for the service.
As others said, I don't think the added weight of a drone would be a concern but i have no experience here.
Weight, qi chargers aren’t just an antenna they require power handling electronics. Getting the exact right DC voltage to charge a battery from two lightweight wires is just simpler internally.
I presume the current transformer is spec'd for a particular range of current/voltage. Would the drone need to assess if the line is a suitable one before (or after) connecting?
Also was a private power line used, or did the university ask the power company for permission before conducting their field tests?
The voltage of the powerline is not relevant since the charging principle is based on inductive coupling. So as long as you have a current above ~100A the harvester should work, irrespective of voltage. And high currents equal higher charging power.
To optimize charging time, the drone could perhaps analyze the magnetic fields to determine which line has the highest current to optimize charging time. But I would assume some sort of balancing is happening between the lines and phases.
The powerline used is a custom mockup with just 5V AC. But we have also landed on real powerlines. I think there's a video in the channel of the OP video.
As others have pointed out, the energy consumed would literally be “too cheap to meter.”
More realistic would be that, If fully realized, this becomes a great secondary income stream for the power line owners.
Not only do they get to monitor their own lines with self-powering drones, but they rent out access to delivery drones, traffic monitoring drones, and (yes) whatever nefarious and helpful uses people dream up. Monitoring would not have to be perfect in order for them to still make huge profits.
Seems more akin to how the railroad companies realized that could make a fortune by using their right-of-ways for communications cables.
And for monitoring: seems like an obvious solution would be to have monitoring drones that watch for usage by other drones. :)
"Electromagnetic Simulation of Split-Core Current Transformer for Medium Voltage Applications" by N. Paudel, V. Siddharth, S. Shaw and D. Raschka (2018)
Very cool, but I see one major problem with this. You need pretty large currents in these lines. They say above 100A. I'm not sure what are the usage patterns of such lines I'd be surprised if it wasn't substantially below 100A of current even on lower voltage lines.
For example the lowest voltage that is used in my country (befoeits stepped down for consumers) is 10kV. This system would need 1MW of load to be useful. So let's say the line supplies a small community of 250 houses. Each house would need to be running a load of 4kW. How reliably can we predict such usage?
So I think this is going to be limited to "perch" on large inter-City connections.
I can't imagine power companies would be ok with this. People go to jail for tapping into power lines. Energy theft from power lines is illegal.
Even if this was somehow allowed by power companies, I wonder if they would be any weight considerations if multiple drones hooked on to the same line span.
I see applications for this, but anyone operating these drones would need clearance from the power company they are tapping into.
> "I can't imagine power companies would be ok with this. People go to jail for tapping into power lines."
Presumably it's the power companies (specifically, transmission network and distribution network operators) who will be most interested in this. They're increasingly using drones for infrastructure inspection, finding faults, etc.
Funny enough my engineering capstone tried something very similar but much more stupidly complicated. Do it while flying a parabola with a winged drone. Never got the control system to work…crashed into a lot of local power lines.
Our assumed customer was power companies doing inspection.
For affordable long range assassination operations. Make it in clear matte plastic, quiet, low flying, add some obstacle avoidance and facial recognition perhaps. Quite a nasty package under 1500 dollars I bet. Could even be ultra small w poison darts too.
Pretty cool, though my take is that if it's recharging just from induction it's essentially stealing the electricity... I suppose if the owners of the lines want to have autonomous drones monitor their status, that's not stealing, but if you wanted to release some little flying vampire drones of your own which could run indefinitely that way, someone might be less amused.
It's odd that people in the comments assume use without permission and stealing.
You wouldn't attempt any of this without permission, regulatory approval and insurance, unless you wanted to be sued, prosecuted and go broke if something went wrong. How do people think the real world operates exactly?
driving drunk is illegal as shit too, but you can't be naive enough to believe that's enough to stop people from doing that. If you had a drone and wanted to see if this worked, you'd just drive 50 miles from your house and just... try it out. The US isn't yet covered with surveillance cameras like the UK.
Bro, "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" is a pretty common saying in business circles. A lot of enormous businesses, such as Uber or AirBnB, were founded completely on operating without permission, regulatory approval, or insurance, until those things were absolutely forced upon them, and even then they didn't always comply with the law. It's also common that companies assume they will be sued, and go ahead anyway because they know they'll make more money than they'll be sued for. And if you do get sued... there's a good chance you can just never pay up, which I'm seeing more and more often.
The real world is certainly not your optimistic "corporations won't do anything wrong because they're afraid they'll get in trouble".
> A passively actuated gripping mechanism grasps the powerline cable during landing after which a control circuit regulates the magnetic field inside a split-core current transformer to provide sufficient holding force as well as battery recharging.
When the grippers close they probably close the loops of a coil that wraps around the wire. So it's harvesting the ever changing magnetic field that arises from AC current, independent of voltage. You can still get some power from coils that aren't wrapped around the wire but are still parallel. I think that's how wireless phone chargers work.
You can also take power using a capacitor instead of an inductor, from the changing voltage (not current) in an AC line. Like when you hold a florescent tube vertical under a hi-power line, and it lights up.
If that can be measured, I would be pretty surprised.
I would project that the drain from all possible drone charging is orders of magnitude less than the e.g. coronal loss or the static radiation that blasts my ham radio.
Any legal action would need to be able to document that loss, one would think.
But you agree the loss exists, right? It's simply difficult to detect from some aggregate noisy flow at a centralized location, because the system was never designed to make that easily measurable.
The amount could be estimated by looking at how much flying the drones do between charges, or by suing for access to charging/position telemetry of the units.
This could become a major power draw over decades. It's probably time to figure out a protocol. E.g. a cheap light small low power meter on the drone that can post the transaction to the electric company while in flight, signals to designate power lines as in or out of the system and their current price, etc. Solar roof owners could compete with the utilities. There are unicorns hiding in this forest.
The vampires will be the charging drones that aren't associated with a transaction. So it's about as enforceable as a requirement that drones have accurate identifier transponders.
If I was the power distribution owner I would not trust the drone meters. Probably would need some type of load profiling on the distribution side, then all the drone has to do is authenticate a valid customer id for billing.
I don't think you know how infinitesimal the amount of power would be. Assuming a Mavic Mini traveling at its maximum speed of 29 miles per hour, it could cross the continental united states in 99 hours for 36 cents worth of electricity.
More likely it’ll be utility companies that want to do remote and autonomous inspection of the transmission network. It’s already a big business, but if you can run the drone the entire length of the line without relocating the base as frequently, or have no base at all and transmit data over 5G? Big wins.
I imagine something like a weaponized version of this, loitering semi autonomous drone swarms fully charged / ready to deploy hanging off wires... a bit like the US spider munition or just smart landmines.
And we had loitering missiles for a long while too. They are a valid use case.
> You just launch them when you have a target.
That is the magic. You can launch a loitering munition when you don’t yet have a target but suspect there might be one. This is very often the case with surface to air missile systems. If they radiate you can use that as a guiding signal to hit them, so most of the time they don’t. You launch the loitering munition which either baits them into radiating or you use something else as bait. Either way you get them to radiate and then the loitering munition already in the air homes in on that signal and destroys the radar, or if it is smarter the personel.
The reason you want these to be in the air before they radiate is to shorten the reaction time. That way you can capitalise even on short burst of activity.
In the end you either destroyed the SAM or supressed them by scarring them into not to radiate.
If this sounds scifi to you, these are weapons from the 80s. Already old news.
"Terrorists" could just bolt a buzzsaw to a drone, drive a mile away from the power line in a truck with a few barrels of extra diesel and a generator and cut away until they get bored of it.
But I see an opportunity for the security theater industry there...
Those are different kind of drones. To successfully enhance a refinery, it takes a smallish plane with a pot of explosives, not a tiny grenade-dropper or fpv.
Semi-seriously: Yet another item on the list of ideas I totally came up with on my own, honest, I just never did the hard work to make it real.
(I know, I know, my ideas count for nothing when I don't turn them into reality. Actually making hardware means solving a lot more problems than my imagination provides, and who likes facing those surprises in side-projects?)
Yeah, this idea was pretty obvious -- both at LANL and JPL I worked in labs that were doing perching drones and we talked about landing on powerlines and charging inductively. The LANL work was 2013 and the JPL work was 2018. I think most "good ideas" are going to be thought of by thousands of people before they become a useful reality. Ideas per se really are pretty worthless and patents are only useful as a means of proxy warfare between large corporations, I'm afraid.
Ever since I was a kid I've wanted to build a hanging chair something that latches onto powerlines and travels along them :-)
Also reminds me of how I actually built a burrito delivery drone for fun that lowered a burrito on a winch a couple of years before the "tacocopter" story started doing the rounds on the news (early 2010s). It's interesting that drone delivery never made it beyond rural pharmaceuticals.
I believe you can get patents without a physical model?
I wouldn't have bothered with a patent for something like this though. Probably is money in it now I think about it, but patents are just not the kind of thing I think much about.
Can't wait for the failure mode where they sit over HVDC lines, fail because there's no alternating magnetic field, and then fall on them and hobble the infrastructure.
The gripper has several modes. There's a mode for charging the battery and providing holding force given AC powerline current, a mode for just holding the drone without charging given AC powerline current (if battery is full), and another mode where a small current (about 1W power) is taken from the battery and used to provide holding force in the case where there is no powerline current. Additionally, the gripper can be designed to fail open or fail closed, whichever is deemed appriate for the end-user.
Such drones are not practical in the war zone, because this introduces dependency on wires and electricity. In our air space it's no helpful. In enemy air space it's vulnerable to enemy action.
It's going to be a very costly operation to go retrieve one of those once it's "gripper" ultimately fails. That's hoping it fails closed instead of failing open. Getting these parked in the face of upcoming weather is not going to be particularly fun, either.
Given that you need a solid alternate location anyways, why not just go there instead? Then we can build safe single function autonomous ground charging stations that a human being can just walk up to and service on foot.
The application is for drones doing work in the field and needed to recharge on that basis, it's actually a very good solution for coverage of a large, possible remote, area. The alternative is a large number of charging locations which is very expensive.
There's no need for alternate charging or parking in weather. Besides merely going into a hibernating state with a radio beacon and light in emergencies, recovery could be via a vehicle positioned in an optimal location relative to the drones where they can all converge and be collected. In the case of charging limitations you could execute more than one convergence location.
Also the drones could be used to remove failed drones stuck on lines.
I'm suggesting that hanging random amounts of weight off of power lines is probably not a great engineering plan, less so if the wind or heat or load picks up significantly. My concern isn't for the drones it's for the actual power infrastructure.
Are the drones designed for inspection or for heavy lifting and applying mechanical leverage against other objects? Are you so sure they're going to be able to do both?
It's trying to solve two problems at once, and while the solutions individually may be clever, combined they seem like a total waste and fraught with complications.
I mean… who’s to say you aren’t operating these for nefarious purposes and the last thing you want to do is have them go back to a central location? Or if they are part of a defensive perimeter, or a long haul operation, where centralized service is problematic? These could be used for power line infrastructure observation and possibly even repairs at some point.
This is the funniest thing I saw this week. The idea that such a teensy drone could travel continental distances by hanging like a bat and recharge between runs. Sure solar gliders may keep aloft indefinitely too. But this one steals its juice!
https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/ocs/saildrone
>With a speed through the water of 2-8kts, they have a range of more than 16,000 nautical miles, and endurance of up to 12 months.
Different usages: the flying drone for land, this one for crossing oceans.
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Saying "this would be good for power line inspection drones" is true, but think bigger. Imagine if you could operate a fleet of delivery, surveillance, _whatever_ drones, with an already in place, widely distributed charging infrastructure that costs you nothing to build (but you pay for usage).
This is like in-flight refueling massively extending the operating range of jet aircraft.
You don't even need many drones for surveillance, just a few ones that deploy mini cameras using power lines both for power and communication. Cameras wouldn't need a battery to operate because they'd remain in place. No drive logic, no sensors, no motors, no batteries: much cheaper, just leave each one at regular distance and collect information remotely.
I should have probably left surveillance out because I was thinking less about panopticon style surveillance and more things like traffic patterns, crop growth, etc.
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sounds like a dystopian nightmare
You're only thinking of the near certainty that a ubiquitous surveillance state would lead to government corruption, mass incarceration, general anxiety, the disruption of norms, and the end of many civil liberties. Try to focus on the upside potential for a small number of investors!
Jebediah out shooting line-skaters with his double-barrel was not in any dystopian sci-fi book I read.
I imagine that billing for the electricity usage will be the power company’s distant second concern behind the mechanical stress of hanging unauthorized devices off a cable that was not designed with this scenario in mind.
As mentioned in another comment, these cables are designed to handle orders of magnitude more stress than a drone. (Think wind storms, entire flocks of birds, blown debris, etc)
For example, See this video of how wires are inspected by humans crawling along them: https://youtu.be/oBJyyEAw-6g?si=QVqBgjqwlM4XCGKl
If anything, this offers utility operators a massive new revenue opportunity. Drone fleets could pay to "perch" and recharge (giving unlimited range and ubiquitous charging), all just by reusing existing infrastructure. No need for a massive new infrastructure buildout, and "nothing left to take away" design.
Big future for whoever can successfully commercialize this.
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It's not that simple: just because you add a safety margin on a construction element, doesn't mean you're allowed to use this safety margin.
For example if a chain has a certified Weight Limit Load of 1 T, it means it actually lifted 4 T (or 10 T if it's certified to lift people). This is because a lifting sling is tested in very controllable environment when it's new, whereas on a building site it will be subject to dynamical stress caused by winds, it will be hit, it will be used in various temperatures etc.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong: in case of power cables there might not be such a rigidly defined safety margin in law, and experts may figure out some assumptions, like the drones not operating during wind storms, in which the safety margin is more than needed - and therefore there's some spare capacity BEFORE the the actually needed safety margin.
But are they designed to carry those loads with a drone flock. They’ll also increase the received wind load. Unlikely to cause an issue but you still have to do the math to determine the decrease to the margin of safety
Definitely looks like a new idea that will have some fetching about for a reason for it to be illegal.
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The cost of the electricity provided is negligible compared to the value of providing such a readily accessible and geographically available changing network. I wouldn't be surprised if the metered cost of the electricity itself isn't even factored in to the bill when charging for the service.
As others said, I don't think the added weight of a drone would be a concern but i have no experience here.
You can hold up fluorescent tubes under high voltage power lines and they will light up.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fluorescent+tubes+power+lines&iar=...
I've always wondered why drones didn't just come with qi charger landing pads.
> didn't just come with qi charger landing pads.
Weight, qi chargers aren’t just an antenna they require power handling electronics. Getting the exact right DC voltage to charge a battery from two lightweight wires is just simpler internally.
Let's take that a step farther and have the drone implement direct coupling and charge while flying near the power lines.
Guessing a magnetic torque would be applied while flying that said drone would have to counter.
I presume the current transformer is spec'd for a particular range of current/voltage. Would the drone need to assess if the line is a suitable one before (or after) connecting?
Also was a private power line used, or did the university ask the power company for permission before conducting their field tests?
The voltage of the powerline is not relevant since the charging principle is based on inductive coupling. So as long as you have a current above ~100A the harvester should work, irrespective of voltage. And high currents equal higher charging power.
To optimize charging time, the drone could perhaps analyze the magnetic fields to determine which line has the highest current to optimize charging time. But I would assume some sort of balancing is happening between the lines and phases.
The powerline used is a custom mockup with just 5V AC. But we have also landed on real powerlines. I think there's a video in the channel of the OP video.
Looks like the tests were run on a private line belonging to an airport. From the associated PDF[0]:
> “Testing was conducted at the outdoor three-phase powerline setup at HCA Airport in Odense, Denmark at the disposal of the authors…”
[0]: https://findresearcher.sdu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/25601008...
That is going to be really hard (impossible?) to monitor for billing purposes. Basically would have to resort to self reporting/honor system.
As others have pointed out, the energy consumed would literally be “too cheap to meter.”
More realistic would be that, If fully realized, this becomes a great secondary income stream for the power line owners.
Not only do they get to monitor their own lines with self-powering drones, but they rent out access to delivery drones, traffic monitoring drones, and (yes) whatever nefarious and helpful uses people dream up. Monitoring would not have to be perfect in order for them to still make huge profits.
Seems more akin to how the railroad companies realized that could make a fortune by using their right-of-ways for communications cables.
And for monitoring: seems like an obvious solution would be to have monitoring drones that watch for usage by other drones. :)
Or good old fashioned theft.
https://www.comsol.com/paper/image/66162/big.png
From the following paper:
"Electromagnetic Simulation of Split-Core Current Transformer for Medium Voltage Applications" by N. Paudel, V. Siddharth, S. Shaw and D. Raschka (2018)
https://www.comsol.com/paper/electromagnetic-simulation-of-s...
Related:
Learn everything about the Split-Core Current Transformer:
https://innovatorsguru.com/split-core-current-transformer
Video about Current Transformers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Vw40nUSwA&t=92s
Very cool, but I see one major problem with this. You need pretty large currents in these lines. They say above 100A. I'm not sure what are the usage patterns of such lines I'd be surprised if it wasn't substantially below 100A of current even on lower voltage lines.
For example the lowest voltage that is used in my country (befoeits stepped down for consumers) is 10kV. This system would need 1MW of load to be useful. So let's say the line supplies a small community of 250 houses. Each house would need to be running a load of 4kW. How reliably can we predict such usage?
So I think this is going to be limited to "perch" on large inter-City connections.
Flying trolleybuses :)
If you live near a power line, is it worth it to have a few drones automatically go back and forth and recharge your house batteries for free?
I can't imagine power companies would be ok with this. People go to jail for tapping into power lines. Energy theft from power lines is illegal.
Even if this was somehow allowed by power companies, I wonder if they would be any weight considerations if multiple drones hooked on to the same line span.
I see applications for this, but anyone operating these drones would need clearance from the power company they are tapping into.
> "I can't imagine power companies would be ok with this. People go to jail for tapping into power lines."
Presumably it's the power companies (specifically, transmission network and distribution network operators) who will be most interested in this. They're increasingly using drones for infrastructure inspection, finding faults, etc.
1000%.
Funny enough my engineering capstone tried something very similar but much more stupidly complicated. Do it while flying a parabola with a winged drone. Never got the control system to work…crashed into a lot of local power lines.
Our assumed customer was power companies doing inspection.
For affordable long range assassination operations. Make it in clear matte plastic, quiet, low flying, add some obstacle avoidance and facial recognition perhaps. Quite a nasty package under 1500 dollars I bet. Could even be ultra small w poison darts too.
You know whats really quiet?
A supersonic missile.
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You had me until poison darts!
Shaped 10g C4 charges
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If the FBI was going to kick down your door over this I think the $5 of energy you stole would be at the bottom of their list of concerns.
Power companies are really the only ones who care about inspecting power lines anyway...
Pretty cool, though my take is that if it's recharging just from induction it's essentially stealing the electricity... I suppose if the owners of the lines want to have autonomous drones monitor their status, that's not stealing, but if you wanted to release some little flying vampire drones of your own which could run indefinitely that way, someone might be less amused.
It's odd that people in the comments assume use without permission and stealing.
You wouldn't attempt any of this without permission, regulatory approval and insurance, unless you wanted to be sued, prosecuted and go broke if something went wrong. How do people think the real world operates exactly?
Oh but the scenario where the drone does it without permission is just way more entertaining.
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For this public demonstration, sure.
I’m curious how you think power companies are supposed to be aware of entities leeching off transmission lines?
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driving drunk is illegal as shit too, but you can't be naive enough to believe that's enough to stop people from doing that. If you had a drone and wanted to see if this worked, you'd just drive 50 miles from your house and just... try it out. The US isn't yet covered with surveillance cameras like the UK.
Have you met Silicon Valley?
> How do people think the real world operates exactly?
uh.. "Move fast and break things" and "It's easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission" come to mind.
Bro, "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" is a pretty common saying in business circles. A lot of enormous businesses, such as Uber or AirBnB, were founded completely on operating without permission, regulatory approval, or insurance, until those things were absolutely forced upon them, and even then they didn't always comply with the law. It's also common that companies assume they will be sued, and go ahead anyway because they know they'll make more money than they'll be sued for. And if you do get sued... there's a good chance you can just never pay up, which I'm seeing more and more often.
The real world is certainly not your optimistic "corporations won't do anything wrong because they're afraid they'll get in trouble".
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I was trying to figure out exactly how it charges with just 1 pole. It must be induction in that case, right?
From the video description:
> A passively actuated gripping mechanism grasps the powerline cable during landing after which a control circuit regulates the magnetic field inside a split-core current transformer to provide sufficient holding force as well as battery recharging.
When the grippers close they probably close the loops of a coil that wraps around the wire. So it's harvesting the ever changing magnetic field that arises from AC current, independent of voltage. You can still get some power from coils that aren't wrapped around the wire but are still parallel. I think that's how wireless phone chargers work.
You can also take power using a capacitor instead of an inductor, from the changing voltage (not current) in an AC line. Like when you hold a florescent tube vertical under a hi-power line, and it lights up.
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It could have a small spool of wire to drop to the ground to make contact. This would allow the drone to rest on the wire while charging.
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If that can be measured, I would be pretty surprised.
I would project that the drain from all possible drone charging is orders of magnitude less than the e.g. coronal loss or the static radiation that blasts my ham radio.
Any legal action would need to be able to document that loss, one would think.
But you agree the loss exists, right? It's simply difficult to detect from some aggregate noisy flow at a centralized location, because the system was never designed to make that easily measurable.
The amount could be estimated by looking at how much flying the drones do between charges, or by suing for access to charging/position telemetry of the units.
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This video would probably suffice to document the loss, assuming the recharging was done without the utility's permission.
This could become a major power draw over decades. It's probably time to figure out a protocol. E.g. a cheap light small low power meter on the drone that can post the transaction to the electric company while in flight, signals to designate power lines as in or out of the system and their current price, etc. Solar roof owners could compete with the utilities. There are unicorns hiding in this forest.
The vampires will be the charging drones that aren't associated with a transaction. So it's about as enforceable as a requirement that drones have accurate identifier transponders.
If I was the power distribution owner I would not trust the drone meters. Probably would need some type of load profiling on the distribution side, then all the drone has to do is authenticate a valid customer id for billing.
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Who cares? If they don’t want their power drawn they need to be burying their powerlines anyway.
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I don't think you know how infinitesimal the amount of power would be. Assuming a Mavic Mini traveling at its maximum speed of 29 miles per hour, it could cross the continental united states in 99 hours for 36 cents worth of electricity.
~2kwh of electricity is around 160 aH at 12V, surely the Mini is more than 20W power at top speed?
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Armed forces don't care. Get it? The likeliest user of this technology will be armed forces.
The biggest use case for this would be inspecting the powerlines, so presumably not stealing in that case.
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More likely it’ll be utility companies that want to do remote and autonomous inspection of the transmission network. It’s already a big business, but if you can run the drone the entire length of the line without relocating the base as frequently, or have no base at all and transmit data over 5G? Big wins.
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There probably are exemptions for emergency or defense applications.
Would this have energy loss in the same way a phone wireless charger has? Or is this just leeching energy that would be lost anyway
No this definitely drains energy from the power line.
Reminds me of this video demonstrating this on the ground with a self wound inductor.
I'm assuming the one on the drone is optimized for the voltage/freqency of that transmission line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLS8pbDNHbk
I imagine something like a weaponized version of this, loitering semi autonomous drone swarms fully charged / ready to deploy hanging off wires... a bit like the US spider munition or just smart landmines.
You don't need them to loiter. You just launch them when you have a target. We've had that for a long time; its called a missile.
And we had loitering missiles for a long while too. They are a valid use case.
> You just launch them when you have a target.
That is the magic. You can launch a loitering munition when you don’t yet have a target but suspect there might be one. This is very often the case with surface to air missile systems. If they radiate you can use that as a guiding signal to hit them, so most of the time they don’t. You launch the loitering munition which either baits them into radiating or you use something else as bait. Either way you get them to radiate and then the loitering munition already in the air homes in on that signal and destroys the radar, or if it is smarter the personel.
The reason you want these to be in the air before they radiate is to shorten the reaction time. That way you can capitalise even on short burst of activity.
In the end you either destroyed the SAM or supressed them by scarring them into not to radiate.
If this sounds scifi to you, these are weapons from the 80s. Already old news.
You should pay more attention to the war in Ukraine.
Prev. post / original publication: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39943807
Earlier post (also no discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39679772
There is no previous discussion.
Edited
The pessimist in me says developing this tech into a standard would be handing terrorists a very quick and effective way to shear power lines.
"Terrorists" could just bolt a buzzsaw to a drone, drive a mile away from the power line in a truck with a few barrels of extra diesel and a generator and cut away until they get bored of it.
But I see an opportunity for the security theater industry there...
They'll just shoot the power station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
I hope Ukrainians are watching this. It would be a shame if even a single russian refinery remained out of their drones range.
Those are different kind of drones. To successfully enhance a refinery, it takes a smallish plane with a pot of explosives, not a tiny grenade-dropper or fpv.
Wow! Is there any project which allows collaborative SLAM? OSM/Mapillary for commercial drones basically.
This opens up all kinds of legal issues. The military applications could be very interesting as well.
I would guess that in some juristictions the land owner the line sits on may have to be considered.
Don't tell your electricity company about this :D
Congrats to the team.
Semi-seriously: Yet another item on the list of ideas I totally came up with on my own, honest, I just never did the hard work to make it real.
(I know, I know, my ideas count for nothing when I don't turn them into reality. Actually making hardware means solving a lot more problems than my imagination provides, and who likes facing those surprises in side-projects?)
Yeah, this idea was pretty obvious -- both at LANL and JPL I worked in labs that were doing perching drones and we talked about landing on powerlines and charging inductively. The LANL work was 2013 and the JPL work was 2018. I think most "good ideas" are going to be thought of by thousands of people before they become a useful reality. Ideas per se really are pretty worthless and patents are only useful as a means of proxy warfare between large corporations, I'm afraid.
Ever since I was a kid I've wanted to build a hanging chair something that latches onto powerlines and travels along them :-)
Also reminds me of how I actually built a burrito delivery drone for fun that lowered a burrito on a winch a couple of years before the "tacocopter" story started doing the rounds on the news (early 2010s). It's interesting that drone delivery never made it beyond rural pharmaceuticals.
Semi serious: was that enough to have patented the idea yourself?
I believe you can get patents without a physical model?
I wouldn't have bothered with a patent for something like this though. Probably is money in it now I think about it, but patents are just not the kind of thing I think much about.
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Can't wait for the failure mode where they sit over HVDC lines, fail because there's no alternating magnetic field, and then fall on them and hobble the infrastructure.
The gripper has several modes. There's a mode for charging the battery and providing holding force given AC powerline current, a mode for just holding the drone without charging given AC powerline current (if battery is full), and another mode where a small current (about 1W power) is taken from the battery and used to provide holding force in the case where there is no powerline current. Additionally, the gripper can be designed to fail open or fail closed, whichever is deemed appriate for the end-user.
Ukraine will be taking note.
Such drones are not practical in the war zone, because this introduces dependency on wires and electricity. In our air space it's no helpful. In enemy air space it's vulnerable to enemy action.
It's going to be a very costly operation to go retrieve one of those once it's "gripper" ultimately fails. That's hoping it fails closed instead of failing open. Getting these parked in the face of upcoming weather is not going to be particularly fun, either.
Given that you need a solid alternate location anyways, why not just go there instead? Then we can build safe single function autonomous ground charging stations that a human being can just walk up to and service on foot.
Too clever by half.
The application is for drones doing work in the field and needed to recharge on that basis, it's actually a very good solution for coverage of a large, possible remote, area. The alternative is a large number of charging locations which is very expensive.
There's no need for alternate charging or parking in weather. Besides merely going into a hibernating state with a radio beacon and light in emergencies, recovery could be via a vehicle positioned in an optimal location relative to the drones where they can all converge and be collected. In the case of charging limitations you could execute more than one convergence location.
Also the drones could be used to remove failed drones stuck on lines.
Nope, this is fully clever.
I'm suggesting that hanging random amounts of weight off of power lines is probably not a great engineering plan, less so if the wind or heat or load picks up significantly. My concern isn't for the drones it's for the actual power infrastructure.
Are the drones designed for inspection or for heavy lifting and applying mechanical leverage against other objects? Are you so sure they're going to be able to do both?
It's trying to solve two problems at once, and while the solutions individually may be clever, combined they seem like a total waste and fraught with complications.
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I mean… who’s to say you aren’t operating these for nefarious purposes and the last thing you want to do is have them go back to a central location? Or if they are part of a defensive perimeter, or a long haul operation, where centralized service is problematic? These could be used for power line infrastructure observation and possibly even repairs at some point.
if it flies it spies
this is nice, perfect for surveillance, like boarder control etc.
Now let's get powerlines in the roads for ∞ car charging en route
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i had this idea in 2011
There were previous projects doing it, as well