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.

Comments

Perch?

[Monkeedude1212]

Would it be easier if it were more bat-like, hanging from the line instead of perching?

Re:Perch?

[wvmarle]

Hooking up nose down may be easier, come to think of it. Because then what you should do is basically land on top of the wire with a small forward speed, letting your aircraft slide forward until the hook mounted all the way at the tail catches the wire. Presto, hanging nose down.

Getting off would be simple as well that way: retract the hook, fall down making speed, and just pull up the nose. Now just make sure you hang on a high enough wire.

Taking off hanging nose up is a bit harder, I would guess a tail flip - also a quite standard manoeuvre but requires more height. Unless your engine is so powerful that you can accelerate straight up. Not likely for such a craft.

Re:Perch?

[causality]

The 'perch' is actually quite bat-like. FTA:

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.)

This is all very interesting but ... do we really need another way to spy on people? One would wonder how the hell our ancestors managed to survive without living in a surveillance society.

<hypothetical>It's getting to the point that there may be a market for portable personal EMP devices when battery or supercapacitor technology advances enough. Just fire an EMP burst every so often and take out any such devices that may be near you, assuring your privacy that shouldn't have been threatened in the first place. If that harms cell phones or the computers controlling car engines and such, just do what the government does and call it "collateral damage" in the "war for privacy". You'd be putting it in terms that they understand.</hypothetical>

Re:Perch?

[nospam007]

"One would wonder how the hell our ancestors managed to survive without living in a surveillance society. "

They believed that some old man in the sky was watching them all the time.

Re:Perch?

[Xibby]

I'm over thinking it. Here's a R/C plane going from VTOL to normal flight and back to VTOL.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1322

Re:Perch?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” -Seneca.

Re:Perch?

[westlake]

This is all very interesting but ... do we really need another way to spy on people? One would wonder how the hell our ancestors managed to survive without living in a surveillance society.

Your ancestors never knew what it was like to live outside a surveillance society.

They might be Irish and Catholic, Russian and Jewish, Baptist and Negro - but the densely packed urban neighborhoods they inhabited were small towns writ large.

The small town knows you by sight from the day you are born. It can recite every breath of scandal that has touched your family for the last five generations.

There is one school, one church, one doctor, a general store, a post office....

a saloon, and a gin mill....

The saloon crowd more or less respectable and well-behaved. The gin mill - the road house just out of town - known to one and all for its drunkenness and danger.

 

Charging

[davidwr]

"charging off transmission lines has its own problems."

Not to mention how to bill for it.

Re:Charging

[rah1420]

This brings back memories of when I was a kid. I and my friend had a 'fort' which was coincidentally under one of those "high tension" (what, about 50KV?) power lines.

We had the bright idea that rather than run an extension cord out from his house, we could just shoot an arrow that had a conductor attached to it over the lowest of those power lines, then use a transformer to step it down to the right voltage, and Bob's your uncle; instant television in the old fort.

Fortunately, we were much more interested in the architecture than the elctrical provisioning of said fort and quickly realized how in over our heads we'd be to try something like that.

Re:Charging

[Anonymous Coward]

Something like this?
Man steals electricity with meat hook

(Reuters) - German police are investigating a man for theft after he siphoned electricity off a high-voltage overhead transmission line for one month with the help of an ordinary meat hook, authorities said on Tuesday.

Re:Charging

[rubycodez]

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.

As someone on Facebook mentioned...

[magsol]

"Pooping on cars is the next hurdle."

Re:As someone on Facebook mentioned...

[HTH NE1]

Laserbeak, eject. Operation: wiretapping.

Re:prior art?

[Captain Spam]

So MIT is spending how much money on reinventing the pigeon??

I'm picturing a few pigeons on the line when this microplane perches on it. The pigeons look over at this mechanical oddity with reserved curiosity. Then an artificially-generated voice from the plane states "PAY NO ATTENTION TO ME. I AM A NORMAL PIGEON. I DEFECATE ON CARS AND THE HEADS OF PEOPLE. COO. COO". The pigeons, satisfied with the answer, go about their business.

After they fly off, the plane's voice kicks back in. "HEH HEH HEH. SUCKERS".

The stuff that's actually interesting

[Zackbass]

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

A little side note to the geniuses at MIT

[bplipschitz]

Miniature surveillance aircraft would never need to return to base if they could cling to overhead power lines to recharge their batteries. Now engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are close to perfecting the trick – taking inspiration from birds.

Uh, the birds aren't recharging.

Really.

Re:A little side note to the geniuses at MIT

[ap7]

Usually, sitting high up there, they are discharging!

Re:Who pays for the electricity?

[HTH NE1]

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.