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New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time
- kawfey 8y agoAfter scrolling through their website [0] I can't help but to think of Portal 2's "Official Turrets" trailer [1], except it's batteries instead of bullets. [0]: https://impossible.aero/ https://impossible.aero/ [1]: https://youtu.be/GGPIQ72-2Vg?t=7 https://youtu.be/GGPIQ72-2Vg?t=7
- fisherjeff 8y ago“It can reach speeds of more than 68 kilometers per hour, and can fly more than 75 kilometers before recharging.” So groundbreaking flight time is... one hour?
- make3 8y agothey say multiple times that drones only regularly do 20-25 mins
- Nydhal 8y agoWhile true, groundbreaking should usually mean "order(s) of magnitude" improvement. It would have been more adequate if, say, the drone could last a day. Which would roughly be a 10x improvement.
- xbmcuser 8y agoDoubling flight time is a huge improvement and could be considered groundbreaking as usually you get incremental improvements of 10-15% a year because of improving battery tech.
- wereHamster 8y agoRacing drones only ~3 minutes, barely enough to finish a single race (a few laps around the course). And battery is sometimes the limiting factor in races, where pilots have to slow down just so they are able to finish the course and not drop out of the sky before the race ends. Small FPV acrobatic drones fare not much better, 4-5 minutes at the most if you don't fly too aggressively. The DJI Mavic 2 can stay up for about 30 minutes, according to the manufacturer.
- Moru 8y agoBut a racing drone have to be agile. If you put heavy batteries on the extremeties of the drone, it won't be able to roll or rotate very fast. It also takes more energy to fly faster and with more weight.
- joshvm 8y agoMore specifically, they mean multirotors. Fixed wing aircraft can last much longer. 45 minutes is typical and hours is doable if you have the wingspan and the batteries.
- duchenne 8y agoThe subtitle of the article is: > The US-1, from Impossible Aerospace, can fly for 2 hours If the drones goes at full speed, it loses more energy due to increased fiction with air and between mechanical parts. So, it reaches neither maximum flight time nor maximum flight range. The optimal speed to reach 75km is probably smaller.
- jjcm 8y agoI feel like this is more advertising than actual innovation. They claim that the battery packs form part of the structural frame, but based on the images on the site [0] it looks like they're just loose batteries inserted everywhere. The lithium batteries themselves aren't providing any structural integrity by the appearance of the drone, and I suspect that they end up using more surface area that has to be structural to encase them than if they just had one giant brick in the center with carbon fiber arms. I'm playing armchair scientist here, but I think the advertising and marketing are better than the actual breakthroughs. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/usZuqFG.png https://i.imgur.com/usZuqFG.png
- asteli 8y agoThat's also terrible from a vehicle agility/stability perspective -- generally you want to centralize mass as much as possible to reduce moment of inertia. Additionally cylindrical cells waste mass on metal casings -- li-poly pouch cells are a better use of mass.
- noobiemcfoob 8y agoWould you not accept 10x terrible handling for 3x longer flight times?
- cecja 8y agowith the newer versions of flight controller you could fly a cow if it had 4 rotors attached. I doubt they will have handling problems.
- ALittleLight 8y agoDepends on the purpose of the mission. Flying for fun or to deliver packages agility is probably more important. Flying for surveillance perhaps it would be better to be in the air longer.
- heavenlyblue 8y agoTo be fair, what's going to happen to the drone shipping industry is probably the same thing that happened to the naval shipping industry: we will converge somewhere at local minima between super-fast and super-cheap shipping times. So I could see how fitting the batteries everywhere in the drone might just work. But at the same time I don't see why no one is yet shaping the batteries for the frame itself.
- mg96226 8y agoNot sure how much innovation this is, considering it trades extended flight time for the inability to replace the battery pack. You get to fly longer, but once you're done, you're done until you can plug it in and give it the 90 minutes it needs to recharge. For most applications, field-swappable batteries are a must. The real breakthroughs will come from new battery chemistry and fuel cells.
- Hysterisis 8y agoTerms like “groundbreaking” and “game changer” get thrown around so much now that they’ve lost all meaning.
- Lorin 8y agowhy would it be "groundbreaking" if it's in the air :)
- Moru 8y agoWhen that weight of batteries comes down after running out of power, it will break the ground.
- foobarbecue 8y agoDrone startups often crash so hard they may be said to break the ground on the way down.
- foobarbecue 8y agoWhy do people buy into this sort of nonsense?? How are VCs and tech writers so incapable of basic conceptual verification?? This company appears to have built nothing except for ideas which don't stand up to the most cursory physical analysis.
- therein 8y agoMakes me feel bad about the entire ecosystem. All it takes is to have the right network and some charisma to get their money.
- allthenews 8y ago>“It never made sense to me that it was possible to have a battery-powered car that could drive more than 300 miles but not have a battery-powered drone that could fly more than about 20 minutes,” he says. I don't see why...drone flight requires substantial power output to counteract gravity, which increases in proportion to the battery mass. Unlike a rolling vehicle This stinks of marketing gibberish.
- perilunar 8y agoAlso very little opportunity for regenerative braking.
- dotancohen 8y agoWhile quickly descending use the motors as a generator via autorotation? I'm only joking, but there might in fact be practical application of the concept.
- perilunar 8y agoI don't actually know if it's possible to autorotate a quadcopter. I imagine you would have very little control during the transition. Quadcopters don't fly very high anyway, so there's probably little to gain from it.
- foobarbecue 8y agoESC electronics usually doesn't support this, but I've wanted to try for many years.
- thx11389793 8y agoautorotation requires control of blade pitch.
- perilunar 8y agoIt certainly does in helicopters, which have large, relatively heavy blades you really don’t want to stop turning. In a quadcopter the blades a small and light, so you could conceivably stop them and let them turn them in reverse as the airflow changes direction (from downwards to up through the blades). I think there would be real problem with control during the transition, and you’d need a lot of height to make it worthwhile.
- bryguy 8y agoDoes anyone know about hydrogen-powered drones? Something worth considering? https://danieldonatelli.wixsite.com/hydrogen-generator/hydrogen-fuel-cell-drone https://danieldonatelli.wixsite.com/hydrogen-generator/hydro...
- foobarbecue 8y agoYeah, I remember reading about a startup a couple of years ago that was going to have a quadcopter carry a hydrogen fuel cell and a compressed h2 tank. It wasn't complete BS, but the tank was at something insane like 5000 psi if I remember correctly. So it sounded extremely dangerous to me. Anybody remember what this company was called?
- sonium 8y agoIf someone would like to check the validity of their claim, here is a great calculation tool for drones: https://www.ecalc.ch/xcoptercalc.php https://www.ecalc.ch/xcoptercalc.php
- Tarragon 8y ago"Groundbreaking Flight Time" for a quadrotor. In 2005 AC-Propulsion flew a fixed wing drone for 48 hours and could have gone indefinitely. https://www.machinedesign.com/news/solar-powered-uav-flies-two-days-straight https://www.machinedesign.com/news/solar-powered-uav-flies-t...