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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.
"charging off transmission lines has its own problems."
Not to mention how to bill for it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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".
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
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.
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>
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"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.
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
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.
Usually, sitting high up there, they are discharging!