Comment by foobarbecue

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.