Micro Plane That Perches On Power Lines 192
An anonymous reader wrote in to tell us about a microplane that perches on power lines to recharge its batteries being developed as a surveillance device at MIT. As you can imagine, landing on a power line is hard to do ... and charging off transmission lines has its own problems.
Re:Perch? (Score:3, Informative)
The MIT engineers' answer is to send their 30-centimetre-wide micro air vehicle (MAV) into a controlled stall, pointing its nose up at just the right point in its trajectory to collide with and hook onto the cable.
Once it hooks the cable, it is a passive system. Check the video...it hasn't been /.ed (yet.)
Re:Perch? (Score:3, Informative)
It does hang, just from a hook near the nose so it isn't upside down.
Which would make actually hooking up *much* easier, since you need to be nose up which is why you can stall.
Hooking up upside down would be really hard, pointing your nose down makes slowing down just a tad difficult.
What I don't understand is how it is going to take off again. It'd need to unhook and flip nose down before it hit the ground with enough height left to get the speed to generate lift. That doesn't seem like such an easy thing to do...
The stuff that's actually interesting (Score:5, Informative)
If anyone here is actually interested in the science behind this you should have a look at some of the lab's publications on the subject. As per Slashdot tradition, all the brilliant points brought up so far in the comments already have answers, they're just a little bit harder to find this time.
Our research group's website:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/index.html [mit.edu]
On the actual perching work:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Cory08.pdf [mit.edu]
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Hoburg09a.pdf [mit.edu]
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Moore09.pdf [mit.edu]
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Roberts09.pdf [mit.edu]
Rick's PhD thesis on the subject:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/perching_media/CoryThesis.pdf [mit.edu]
and on the controls side:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Tedrake09a.pdf [mit.edu]
Charging through induction (Score:3, Informative)
It shouldn't be too hard to charge a small battery through induction. We already saw an example of this when Richard Box used induction for his fluorescent light art [slashdot.org], and it's not an uncommon subject for questions on underaduate E&M exams [unc.edu].
Re:Who pays for the electricity? (Score:4, Informative)
Generally there are not exposed power lines between your power meter and your home, and even less likely with newer construction. They could trace it to your neighborhood, but not to any one particular home unless they caught it perching.
There are also people working on leeching power from WiFi radio signals in order to recharge cell phones, with the consequence of reducing the range of your WiFi.
I'm looking forward to someone coming up with the not-so-bright idea of recharging electric cars using the induction loops that control the lights at intersections. Like pulling power for your time machine by parking on a rift in Cardiff.
Re:Perch? (Score:1, Informative)
Let me know how that goes for ya.
Also, this article isn't about planes that charge on power lines, its about some students that figured out how to automate the landing/perching maneuver on a small foam ultra light-weight rc unpowered glider.
The glider has no means of propulsion what-so-ever;
it has only 1 control surface, the elevator;
it has a tiny battery just large enough to run the servo and radio receiver;
it can't land in wind, rain, snow, or other real world conditions; AND
all of the sensing and control electronics (high speed motion detection cameras and Matlab running on a laptop) are mounted off-plane.
The reason landing a UAV on powerlines is hard isn't because the powerline are particularly difficult to hit, its because you have to design the landing system to work in real world weather conditions AND you can't have 20 some high speed motion capture cameras already at the landing site AND the thing still has to have all the normal electronics on board to fly after landing AND you have to cram on the large heavy (from a small UAV perspective) battery charging equipment as well.
For anyone interested the ACTUAL website for the ACTUAL study can be found here: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/perching.html [mit.edu]
Re:Charging (Score:5, Informative)
news for you, placing inductor with coil near line doesn't "steal power that was leaking out of the lines anyway", it acts as secondary of transformer that in fact removes energy from line, stealing power that would have gone to customers.