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Micro Plane That Perches On Power Lines
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.
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.)
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
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...
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
On the actual perching work:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Cory08.pdf
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Hoburg09a.pdf
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Moore09.pdf
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Roberts09.pdf
Rick's PhD thesis on the subject:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/perching_media/CoryThesis.pdf
and on the controls side:
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Tedrake09a.pdf
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
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, and it's not an uncommon subject for questions on underaduate E&M exams.
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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.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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.