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Comment by ben_w

2 years ago

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?)

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ben_w

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foobarbecue  2 years ago

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.

pricechild  2 years ago

Semi serious: was that enough to have patented the idea yourself?

  • ben_w  2 years ago

    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.