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Tiny, Morphing, Electricity-Stealing Spy Planes Developed

Posted by Zonk on from the go-go-gadget-gadgetery dept.

tkohler writes "The Air Force Research Lab is developing an Electric Motor-powered Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) that can 'harvest' energy when needed by attaching itself to a power line. It can also temporarily change its shape to look more like innocuous piece of trash hanging from the cable. For domestic spying, maybe it will morph into a pair of sneakers?"

5 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Shoes by Astr4y · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From what I've heard around the county I live in, shoes on the powerlines indicates that there are drug dealers on whatever street they are hanging over.

  2. weird warnings.. by wfberg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Challenges abound, though. Zac Richardson, a power-line engineer with National Grid in the UK, warns that if the MAV contacts an 11-kilovolt local power line, it could short circuit two conductors, causing an automatic disconnection of the very power the plane seeks.

    Why do they assume the UAV would be conductive? Wouldn't your best bet for tapping energy off power lines be to simply use induction? You don't even need to land on the lines themselves; a fluorescent tube light will light up at yards from the power line.

    Do National Grid power-line engineers not know of this?

    --
    SCO employee? Check out the bounty
    1. Re:weird warnings.. by pclminion · · Score: 4, Interesting

      To do that the UAV would have to hover sufficiently close to the power line. I bet the power used to hover is more than the power you could possibly extract by induction.

    2. Re:weird warnings.. by richard.cs · · Score: 5, Interesting

      so are you telling me that if I throw a fluorescent light at a power line it will glow?

      Not quite. Hold one end of the tube, point the other end at the line. Needs to be one of the higher voltage ones cos experience shows that 11kV doesn't cut it (although it might work if the lines were really close to the ground, depends on the electrostatic field in Volts per meter). The tube will light but not that brightly so you'll have to do it at night for it to be visible. Ever see this photo?

  3. Re:Meh by dbIII · · Score: 4, Interesting
    That is really bizzare - paticularly the idea that it should make the soldiers more interested in sex than fighting. Isn't a typical well trained and highly effective combat soldier more interested in sex than fighting anyway? Even as a computer wrangler I'm far more interesting in sex than adding more cluster nodes and another file server no matter that they have wonderful AMD 8 way goodness - but I can still do my job.

    When you have clueless barbarians with influence you get weird lysenkoism like this.