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Tiny, Morphing, Electricity-Stealing Spy Planes Developed
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?"
It's not made yet. I doubt even a prototype has been made yet.
into the shape of a tin foil hat, and you have a paranoid schizophrenic's deepest nightmare
and if it does morph into sneakers, does that mean we need tin foil socks too?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Nice to see the govt has recruited the help of the Decepticons.
Tiny Morphing Electricity-Stealing Spy Planes flown by Tiny Mighty Morphing Power Rangers on secret missions to defeat Tiny Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!
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.
Autobots Transform and Roll Ou..BIZZZZTTTKKKK
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
...AFRL says the spy plane will need to collapse its wings and hang limply on the cable like a piece of wind-blown detritus
Hey, I didn't know I was doing top secret research. Most of my model planes end up looking just like that!
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
At the moment, this high tech surveillance equipment is cunningly disguised as a barrel full of pork.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
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
Low power. The solar cells would need to spend a lot of time recharging that battery.
Where the line power will quick charge it so it can get back to work doing whatever it does over that suspicious looking nude beach.
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The guy has a point. At 11kv, water conducts and the design of insulators is a nontrivial problem. The idea of something like this deliberately flying into power lines will cause any power systems engineer to worry. Here in the UK, much of the country has significant rainfall, and fluctuating wind. I doubt it would be possible to fly reliably close enough to a power line to tap energy by induction, a small stray gust would take you straight into it.
Fortunately in the UK politicians are not allowed to add pork barrel projects to unrelated bills, the MOD is incompetent, and we have no money thanks to our wonderful banking system, so we won't be able to afford these things. We'll have to stick to cctv cameras that usually don't work, and people conveniently "losing" the results when they do.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I should have given examples, you're right.
Let's use the DARPA challenges as an example of technology which is available to the individual and for which no superior technology existed for the govt. The vehicles from these competitions are created by private citizens and the government did not have anything better.
As image recognition technology progresses it will probably be just as advanced for the individual as for the government. This will probably be because it will be created, not in some government lab, but at Google or perhaps Hans' garage in Berlin. Perhaps the govt will have server-farms all using the image recognition tech to mass view images, but the fundamental algorithms (the tech) will be the same.
I guess my point is that the stuff coming out of government labs these days doesn't really strike me as far superior to that which private labs are producing. In other words, the governments advantage has shifted from quality of technology to quantity.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Hopefully it doesn't turn into a pair of shrinking boxer shorts!
AFRL's initial aim is to work out how to make a MAV flying at 74 kilometres per hour latch onto a power line without destroying itself or the line.
Yeah, that would be the hard part. 'Till you've figured that out, there's nothing to see here.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
That's OK I guess... but their bomb that turns you gay is just fabulous!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
No, that's your "sex" making you go blind.
I'm trying to come up with a reasonable identity for the cosine of experience.
Cute idea. What they're trying to do, it seems, is mooch a little power from the electrostatic field gradient around the wire. This is quite feasible if you have a wire with a few KV to ground. The classic demo is to light up a fluorescent lamp by placing it vertically below a high tension line. This works partly because air is not a perfect insulator. There's an electrical path to ground; it just has a high resistance.
If the thing lands on an 11KV power line that's 10m above ground, and has a conductive part that dips 10cm below the line, it should see a voltage difference of about 90 volts. You can't draw very much current before the voltage difference disappears, but you can draw a little.
It's also possible to extract some energy magnetically. See U.S. Patent #3,202,963, "Apparatus for Illuminating Power Lines". But that approach requires heavier parts than an electrostatic approach.
There are no gay frat boys?
Ah, but you missed something important; the fraternity was named Phi Alpha Gamma.
How much time does this thing require to spend on charging? The exposed powerlines it could latch onto are typicaly 11 kilovolts and up. It wouldn't require a lot of time to charge on those, so doesn it really need to diguise itself? Even if it looked like a pair of sneakers, the fact it flies in and out, might raise more suspicion than the look while charging. Also, the transformers required to take 11kv down to 220v for the house, aren't exactly dainty; how could this device step down the power with lightweight gear? (The power between the transformer and the home are in shielded cables, unlike the 11kv lines.)
FYI: In a typical power pole situation, you have three wires on top (in sort of a triangle config), and one part way down the pole. The top three are three different phases of the AC power, and the one part way down the pole is ground (you can see the occasional tap where the line is grounded to a stake in the ground). The step-down transformers for the home circuits tap into the ground, and one of the three phases, to give you 220v for several homes. (Factories and such will use all three phases for serious equipment.) Often on branch lines, only one of the three phases (and the ground) will be tapped off from the main line, to service some houses (with skinnier looking pole arrangements with only two wires). The fatter, insulated wires on the poles are cable and phone lines.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
what is more stupid is how frequently a young kid with dreams of being rich would stand on a marked corner like that with a pocket full of crack waiting for someone to slow down. more often than not he would get shot or shot at in short order by whoever claimed the spot. i remember some 16 year old kid getting shot with one pocket full of cash and the other full of tiny bags of crack, about a block from the school. the next day the kids there were talking about how he was on "someone else's corner."
the street level drug sales are poor kids with no idea of how dangerous of a profession they are entering. a car slows down, they walk up, the transaction lasts about 30 seconds. if a cop comes they run. always. and since they are neighborhood kids they know every alley. and if they get caught, yeah it usually does take a few offenses to get a custodial sentence because they are underage. by that time they are a career criminal, well on their way to having no chance at a decent life.