Charging drones while in flight.

[JDerrick]

Startup eyes longer drone flights with remote, wireless power.

Startup eyes longer drone flights with remote, wireless power

Redmond, WA-based tech company Ossia seeks to adapt its remote, wireless powering system to extended, possible indefinite drone flights.

dronedj.com

 

[BSauce955]

Startup eyes longer drone flights with remote, wireless power.

Startup eyes longer drone flights with remote, wireless power

Redmond, WA-based tech company Ossia seeks to adapt its remote, wireless powering system to extended, possible indefinite drone flights.

dronedj.com

That's a very interesting concept. Not sure if it works but if it does, I'd love to see this with DJI drones...

 

[Deleted member 103366]

Given how drones scoot around the sky, how on earth would they manage to aim a beam accurately enough to transmit useful power to a drone at any sort of distance? Doesn't the power available in a given area/point drop with the square of the distance from the source?

 

[eEridani]

My Air 2 requires about 75 watts to fly. So any radio transmitting that much power, plus efficiency issues, means 100 watts of directed RF energy to keep it in the air ... what can go wrong?

 

[eEridani]

Given how drones scoot around the sky, how on earth would they manage to aim a beam accurately enough to transmit useful power to a drone at any sort of distance? Doesn't the power available in a given area/point drop with the square of the distance from the source?

Phased array antennas direct the energy to a point. And yes, the beam they form is steerable.

 

[Kilrah]

Yup, makes no sense technically, either you can't deliver anything significant or it would be cooking anything in its path and obviously not be allowed.
There have been multiple companies promising "wireless power" in the past decade or so and they were all complete scams.
Since these guys have been around for 3 years it's obviously the same, just having their marketing dept target another "newfangled tech field" to bring more money every few months while not doing anything or ever intending to actually produce something.

Cota: Real Wireless Power - Page 1

Cota: Real Wireless Power - Page 1

www.eevblog.com

 

[CanadaDrone]

Should something like this come to light, I suspect applications would be heavily focused on things like surveillance where you may want a drone hovering in one sport or one small area for a long period of time (say, during an event).

 

[Deleted member 103366]

Phased array antennas direct the energy to a point. And yes, the beam they form is steerable

Is the one of this thread a phased array?
I don't know what they are but think I have seen mention of that in Star Trek or in connection with the likes of the radio telescope array in the Atacama Desert.
Whatever they are it 'sounds' VERY expensive, lol.

 

[JDerrick]

Should something like this come to light, I suspect applications would be heavily focused on things like surveillance where you may want a drone hovering in one sport or one small area for a long period of time (say, during an event).

That is exactly what I was thinking while reading the story. I bet China would have drones everywhere monitoring their population. If they could get the technology. To see if they were doing anything wrong. Like worshiping God

 

[eEridani]

Is the one of this thread a phased array?
I don't know what they are but think I have seen mention of that in Star Trek or in connection with the likes of the radio telescope array in the Atacama Desert.
Whatever they are it 'sounds' VERY expensive, lol.

Phased Array is a generally a flat array of antennas, each antenna has a mixer of sorts that is phase controllable. By controlling the phase of each antenna, radio waves - both transmitted and received - can be combined in a way that creates a directed beam outward, or received inward. Think of it as an electronically controllable huge parabolic dish, but better. It can be refocused in an instant, directing tight beams at hundreds or thousands of targets per second.

Phased array - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

As for expense, it's relative. Present day wifi access points and mesh systems use similar science and math when forming links to devices around your house. That's why the number of antennas in them is important for performance. The higher the antenna count, generally, the better the beam.

 

[AZDave]

This is nonsense. The only way to beam enough energy to run a drone is do so in a VERY narrow beam because as PhiliusFoggg says, otherwise the energy density drops off as the square of the distance. Now we're essentially talking a high powered laser beam, where any receptor is basically going to create heat with the received energy instead of electric power.

The reference to "bouncing energy off adjacent objects" is pure garbage since at the short wavelengths required to beam that kind of energy almost every object is going to scatter the energy like crazy.

I went to Ossia's web site and it is FILLED with buzz words, half of which are meaningless to anyone with any background in those areas. They make it sound like this stuff is applicable to almost any task and any environment ... which is nothing but marketing hype. They talk about flooding large areas with microwave RF to charge everything from inventory labels to safety badges. That isn't ever going to happen with humans in the picture.

If DroneDJ had bothered the check the column with any competent RF engineer they wouldn't ever have published it.

 

[eEridani]

But but but that lady told me her systems - with a single drop of blood - could discover what I had for breakfast a week ago. She was so nice, she'd never lie to me, would she?

Pretty sure the Ossia system will work with microwatt power needs - things that normally operate off silver button cells for years. But very unlikely any thing else. Then again, maybe they've figured out a way to harness electron quantum jumps.

 

[Kilrah]

where any receptor is basically going to create heat with the received energy instead of electric power.

Eh, I do have a pretty powerful wireless power transmitter, maybe can use it to power a stirling engine on the other end

 

[AZDave]

Eh, I do have a pretty powerful wireless power transmitter, maybe can use it to power a stirling engine on the other end

View attachment 136884

View attachment 136887

What is that from? It looks a lot like the ultraviolet photolithography gear from ASML.

 

[Kilrah]

It's a 450nm, 60W array that's made for laser-lit video projectors. Blue to the eye, the phone's main camera was just having a hard time. Wide angle one does better:

 

[eEridani]

Doesn't 60 watts of light concentrated like that generally ignite whatever it hits rather fast? Even if each beam is only 10 watts - that is a lot of energy in one spot. People have fun popping balloons with a 1w laser pointer, and 5 watts will etch wood.

Yikes - hope you wear protective gear when that thing is on.

 

[Kilrah]

Sure but it's only about 3W there, this is only one row out of 3 that's powered and not much above the threshold current. Never went above 20ish or so so far. 18 beams total (looks much more interesting than a single powerful one!)

 

[Reginald E Johnson]

Just so you guys know, Tesla before he died stated that he knew how to transmit Electricity over the Air! But the funny thing is that when he died, all of his research disappeared!

 

[eEridani]

Just so you guys know, Tesla before he died stated that he knew how to transmit Electricity over the Air! But the funny thing is that when he died, all of his research disappeared!

I've built some of Tesla's hardware. Including his "freepower" motor that can be powered from thin air (really, it can).

That said, there is nothing magical in his thinking, except he was ahead of his time: an early adopter of science.

His power the world is simply based on increasing the electric field in the atmosphere. Nothing mystical, but pretty dangerous. Ossia is trying to do the same, but with magnetic fields. Same problems, same dangers.

 

[AZDave]

Just so you guys know, Tesla before he died stated that he knew how to transmit Electricity over the Air! But the funny thing is that when he died, all of his research disappeared!

Tesla was a genius, but he claimed a lot of things that ended up being either misguided or simply self promotion. It is highly unlikely that he actually knew how to transmit significant amounts of energy through a volume of space for any distance. He tried to demonstrate it a few times, all without success, and basic physics will tell you why.

Regarding the missing papers, here's a good description of what happened:

PBS: Tesla - Master of Lightning: The Missing Papers

Nikola Tesla - The Missing Papers

www.pbs.org

The government initially confiscated them, studied and archived them for years, and my guess either eventually trashed them because they were felt to be bogus or lost them through incompetence. It should tell you a lot that the government has spent billions trying to develop directed energy beams for decades, and none of it uses RF. Conspiracy buffs may like to think otherwise, but physics is physics.