Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations [video]

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 &quot;this would be good for power line inspection drones&quot; 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).<p>This is like in-flight refueling massively extending the operating range of jet aircraft.

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.

You can hold up fluorescent tubes under high voltage power lines and they will light up.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=fluorescent+tubes+power+lines&amp;iar=images&amp;iax=images&amp;ia=images" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=fluorescent+tubes+power+lines&amp;iar=...</a><p>I&#x27;ve always wondered why drones didn&#x27;t just come with qi charger landing pads.

I presume the current transformer is spec&#x27;d for a particular range of current&#x2F;voltage. Would the drone need to assess if the line is a suitable one before (or after) connecting?<p>Also was a private power line used, or did the university ask the power company for permission before conducting their field tests?

That is going to be really hard (impossible?) to monitor for billing purposes. Basically would have to resort to self reporting&#x2F;honor system.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comsol.com&#x2F;paper&#x2F;image&#x2F;66162&#x2F;big.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comsol.com&#x2F;paper&#x2F;image&#x2F;66162&#x2F;big.png</a><p>From the following paper:<p>&quot;Electromagnetic Simulation of <i>Split-Core Current Transformer</i> for Medium Voltage Applications&quot; by N. Paudel, V. Siddharth, S. Shaw and D. Raschka (2018)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comsol.com&#x2F;paper&#x2F;electromagnetic-simulation-of-split-core-current-transformer-for-medium-voltage-66162" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.comsol.com&#x2F;paper&#x2F;electromagnetic-simulation-of-s...</a><p>Related:<p>Learn everything about the <i>Split-Core Current Transformer</i>:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;innovatorsguru.com&#x2F;split-core-current-transformer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;innovatorsguru.com&#x2F;split-core-current-transformer</a><p>Video about Current Transformers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=32Vw40nUSwA&amp;t=92s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=32Vw40nUSwA&amp;t=92s</a>

Very cool, but I see one major problem with this. You need pretty large currents in these lines. They say above 100A. I&#x27;m not sure what are the usage patterns of such lines I&#x27;d be surprised if it wasn&#x27;t substantially below 100A of current even on lower voltage lines.<p>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&#x27;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?<p>So I think this is going to be limited to &quot;perch&quot; on large inter-City connections.

Flying trolleybuses :)<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>I see applications for this, but anyone operating these drones would need clearance from the power company they are tapping into.

Pretty cool, though my take is that if it&#x27;s recharging just from induction it&#x27;s essentially stealing the electricity... I suppose if the owners of the lines want to have autonomous drones monitor their status, that&#x27;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.

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

Reminds me of this video demonstrating this on the ground with a self wound inductor.<p>I&#x27;m assuming the one on the drone is optimized for the voltage&#x2F;freqency of that transmission line.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CLS8pbDNHbk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CLS8pbDNHbk</a>

I imagine something like a weaponized version of this, loitering semi autonomous drone swarms fully charged &#x2F; ready to deploy hanging off wires... a bit like the US spider munition or just smart landmines.

Prev. post &#x2F; original publication: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39943807">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39943807</a>

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.

I hope Ukrainians are watching this. It would be a shame if even a single russian refinery remained out of their drones range.

Wow! Is there any project which allows collaborative SLAM? OSM&#x2F;Mapillary for commercial drones basically.

This opens up all kinds of legal issues. The military applications could be very interesting as well.

Don&#x27;t tell your electricity company about this :D

Congrats to the team.<p>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.<p>(I know, I know, my ideas count for nothing when I don&#x27;t turn them into reality. Actually making hardware means solving a lot more problems than my imagination provides, and who likes facing <i>those</i> surprises in side-projects?)

Can&#x27;t wait for the failure mode where they sit over HVDC lines, fail because there&#x27;s no alternating magnetic field, and then fall on them and hobble the infrastructure.

Ukraine will be taking note.

It&#x27;s going to be a very costly operation to go retrieve one of those once it&#x27;s &quot;gripper&quot; ultimately fails. That&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Too clever by half.

if it flies it spies

this is nice, perfect for surveillance, like boarder control etc.

Now let&#x27;s get powerlines in the roads for ∞ car charging en route

i had this idea in 2011