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?"

Comments

!developed

[yincrash]

It's not made yet. I doubt even a prototype has been made yet.

Re:!developed

[User 956]

It's not made yet. I doubt even a prototype has been made yet.

Well, the prototype for the "stealing" part has already been developed. It's called Congress.

say it will morph

[circletimessquare]

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?

hmm

[pak9rabid]

Nice to see the govt has recruited the help of the Decepticons.

Re:hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont remember any transformers that turned into trash Wrong.

Re:hmm

[Skevin]

It's the perfect camouflage for them. Looking outside my window I can already count six transformers hanging off the power poles in the street, and no one's so much as raising a brow.

Solomon

Whee Adjectives!

[ThanatosMinor]

Tiny Morphing Electricity-Stealing Spy Planes flown by Tiny Mighty Morphing Power Rangers on secret missions to defeat Tiny Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

Shoes

[Astr4y]

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.

Re:Shoes

[XHIIHIIHX]

barefoot drug dealers no less

Re:Shoes

[wfberg]

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.

Actually, it's the drug users that throw the shoes up there. Drug pushers are for some reason (a mystery to medical science) compulsively driven to powerlines with shoes hanging from them. Obviously this is seen as a big problem for the drug dealing community, which is trying to enter the 21st century, leveraging such fast-paced technologies as 'two-way pagers' and 'cellular telephones'. They find themselves involuntarily skulking around power lines in every sort of weather, knowing full well they could be successful drug deals in the back of the local chuck-e-cheese, but find themselves incapable of breaking the spell of such a powerful lure.

Or maybe it's some sort of urban legend or something, and it's just, like, kids with nothing better to do throwing up some shoes. Dunno.

Re:Shoes

[egomaniac]

That's just a stupid urban legend. Shoes hanging from a powerline indicate nothing more than bored kids.

Re:Shoes

[YouWantFriesWithThat]

actually if the shoes are in a gang's color it is their way of claiming the corner, usually for drug sales. a nearby gang would throw up one black and one red shoe tied together because those were their colors. that way other gangs and independent pharmaceutical salespeople are forewarned that they shouldn't set up shop on that intersection. if they do, they are asking to get shot. some gangs use it to claim the turf in general, but mostly it is used to mark drug spots now.

i used to teach in the 'hood and was educated by my students about it. obviously this depends on the part of town we are talking about

The morphing technology is already proven

[Malevolent Tester]

At the moment, this high tech surveillance equipment is cunningly disguised as a barrel full of pork.

weird warnings..

[wfberg]

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?

Re:weird warnings..

[pclminion]

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.

Re:weird warnings..

[richard.cs]

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?

It's a polymorph!

[Black Cardinal]

Hopefully it doesn't turn into a pair of shrinking boxer shorts!

Re:Is why the power goes out when I have sex?

[Grygus]

Is this why every time I have sex the power seems to brownout and then sometimes goes out?
No, that's your "sex" making you go blind.

Just what does that mean?

[ClayJar]

I'm trying to come up with a reasonable identity for the cosine of experience.

Using electrostatic field gradient

[Animats]

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.

Re:Meh

[dbIII]

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.