https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-uekD6VTIQ has a video of their drone on a power line.
"'Vampire drone' can leech electricity from power lines to live forever" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40317484
"Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39945733
Go ~X speed for Y distance(+/-) on Z heading until you reach A landmark and then start a new set of instructions.
Dead reckoning via inertial sensors, cameras, etc are way to complex for the flight controllers without heavier hardware since theyre hugely inefficient.
AI at the sophistication to do this stuff is essentially bloatware. Like running electron instead of a bare metal gui.
So the limit isnt batteries, its fiber spools.
There has been lots of work to make fibre connected drones, so that they can't be located as easily (also the pilot)
A friend of mine worked on a covert comms system for the Rangers to use in the Battle For Berlin that thankfully never occurred. The idea was to clamp onto plumbing, fences, and similar infrastructure where possible. Nodes with radios handed off to other comms systems. It worked reasonably well in tests but I don't know that it went anywhere, point is that the theory is sound.
Yes, I'm sure the markup would be large as a percentage, but for most customers the convenience would be worth it. Most of the customers are probably commercial and don't want to risk getting banned or sued.
“Trust me, bro!” is something I wish my power company would do, but they installed a meter instead.
Almost every US utility has a "UM" process to self-assess an unmetered load's consumption and be billed. So, yes, it's not only viable but widespread.
I wouldn't talk too loud about this or you will ruin it for all of us. If I discover the street lights on my street mine botcoins I will blame you.
What's there alternative in this case? If I can land a drone on the power line and suck up some power, they can either charge me when I tell them I did it, or they can not charge me.
Assuming flight conditions are good, there would be a region around the wire (line of charge) with an electric/magnetic field that the drones could use, any shielding notwithstanding.
Drones consume a lot of power while in flight. You can get a little bit of power out of powerlines standing underneath them with some tricks, but it's not enough to keep a drone in flight. At least not without something prohibitively large to couple to the line.
It's also risky to hover near a stationary object because the longer you hover, the more you're exposed to the risk of a wind gust knocking you into the nearby obstacle.
to power a running drone at more than a few inches would be just...a lot.
You get a million times more power if you can put a coil 1mm away from the wire than if you hover 1 meter away.
I can't say, as a citizen, that I'm particularly excited about this.
> Autonomous drones can deliver over 20x the inspection coverage for the same cost.
And we have 20x the manpower to review this footage? I wonder if you're just generating a bunch of data that cannot be practically used.
"More coverage" isn't always the best answer. "Better informed coverage" is probably the problem to solve here. Aside from that what is the maintenance interval on those drones? How does that incorporate into this system?
I think this is solving the problem in the wrong direction.
And in most cases of inspection, you need to look at the stuff anyway, so any cost reduction is very welcome. And if you do increase the total coverage volume while reducing human time, you get a double benefit of being able to provide more granular information, either in time or in space, which can often be useful.
(And as a commenter below notes - this all works pretty well with several year old CNNs. We use a limited amount of image-LLM stuff to surface things zero-shot, but a lot of what we end up doing is a very conventional classifier with a lot of engineering work to make it very fast for the experts to see only the important things.)
I was involved with a startup that did inspections of power generation windmills. The computer vision anomaly detection was really good and that was about five years ago. The goal was to have the automated visual inspections route images with suspected anomalies to humans for review and it was working well the last time I heard.
Compared to having a human who needs to rappel down to the blades for a manual inspection, this is a huge productivity and safety boost.
I've worked on similar systems for oil & gas that combined hyperspectral imaging and LIDAR. The analysis of data collected by drones was fully automated. It was at least as effective as humans at detecting anomalies (something which was thoroughly verified prior to adoption).
The more thorough coverage, potential issues being detected much earlier, and increased automation greatly reduced the total manpower required. Humans only came into the picture when the drones found a problem that needed mitigation. Humans have long been the bottleneck for finding operational risks and issues before they turn into a headline. The more humans you can remove from that loop the bigger the win.
This was years ago, the tech has only improved.
[0] https://user.physics.unc.edu/~deardorf/phys25/rwp/exam1rwpso...
I live in the PNW of the US where many fires have been started by transformers exploding or whatnot.
Basically every community that has a fire as a result of transmission lines rebuilds them above ground/on poles. Just last month I was going through Detroit, Oregon and their 2-3 year old power lines were all down because of the wind storm. Detroit had a transformer explode a few years ago and it took out much of the community. They immediately rebuilt above ground.
They'll rebuild them on poles again.
So ubiquitous surveillance, literally overhead, without any need to have a nearby/local charging/physical-management station/crew?
> After power companies, we will service rail, road, telecom, real estate and other inspection markets.
Oh?
> After building drones for the Air Force and DARPA, ...
Oh
Also, the whole idea triggers my reflexive skepticism about any technology that seeks to remove the last human from the system. Usually there are exponentially increasing costs to removing the next human, and at some point it's not worth it. People want (wanted) to make sealed, autonomous data centers maintained by robots and it just isn't worth it. Even in manufacturing where robotic automation is ubiquitous and advanced there are still tons of humans.
Is it harvesting energy from the magnetic field (via induction), or does it extracts its energy from the electric field instead?
And does the drone just happen to land on the power line for saving energy while doing so, or is the contact necessary somehow?
Some lamps do use induction, like this one[2].
I guess it uses induction looking at the drone, it also works with an open coil.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balisor
[2]: https://www.delta-box.com/en/marking/bht-marking-light-for-h...
_but_ at 33kv, you start to get corona discharge, which gives you a potential difference, so that might be the mechanism they get power.
(thats a wild guess. )
Edit I did some more digging, induction appears to be magnetic induction, long cables do produce a magnetic field, but not that much (unless you put it in a coil)
Capacitive coupling is much more effective at high voltage.
Seems odd that this would be all in-person roles. Not the most apparent path to relevant talent.
Do the drones need transformers? Won't those be heavy?
Don't the drones need a way to circulate the electricity? IE have a path to ground?
Could robo taxis steal the idea and get recharged w/o going back to base station? They can eject a rod similar to an E-train or how a military plane get refilled.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nikola_Tesla_holding...
> The bulb is a prototype "fluorescent" light he invented consisting of a partially evacuated glass bulb with a single metal electrode. Nearby, probably behind the curtain, there is one of his Tesla coil high voltage oscillators which produces a radio frequency electric field. The electric field ionizes the gas in the bulb, causing it to glow similar to a neon light. This photo is a 2 second time exposure taken by the light of the bulb
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00l1slw < although its not available at the moment
Remember that the primary and secondary side of transformers never touch.
You mean like birds have been doing for decades?! OPEN YOUR EYES, SHEEPLE! BIRDS AREN'T REAL!
/s (I really shouldnt need a /s, but people these days believe anything...)
