7 ms·
In the biomimicry department, I'd look to the birds. Imagine an ornithopter mimic that seeks out power lines, clamps onto them, and powers itself via inductive
by nkoren 15y ago
In the biomimicry department, I'd look to the birds. Imagine an ornithopter mimic that seeks out power lines, clamps onto them, and powers itself via inductive pickups in its feet. Its battery gives it a 10-minute flying range; this gets recharged first. Then it goes into broadcast mode.
Sure, its signals could be triangulated, but if the mimicry is clever enough then it might be difficult to distinguish from a real bird. And it could be equipped with various means of monitoring its environment (such as an RF receiver which monitors the strength of nearby police-frequency broadcasts), which would allow it to rapidly bug out at the first sign of trouble. It takes to the air, circles for a few minutes, then finds another power line and starts over again.
- sneak 15y agoWe get it; you're a Charlie Stross fan.
- weavejester 15y agoNot that's an ingenious idea. It wouldn't necessarily need to fly; an operator could catapult it up and let it hook onto a line, and a lead weight in the tail would orientate it like a real bird. You could either make it disposable (expect it to have a limited lifespan when removed by the authorities), or make it stop transmitting and drop to the ground when it thinks it could be in trouble. Birds tend to be coloured to merge into the undergrowth anyway, and if it drops before it's spotted, it could be very hard to find. An operator would then recover it at a later date.
- weavejester 15y agoOf course I meant "Now that's an ingenious idea". :/
- wisty 15y agoThe hight would be an advantage, and you'd get free power - the best of both worlds. You could put a transmitter (complete with inductive pickups) in place, then fly the drone back for reuse. It would also be quite hard to take down, even if they knew it was there. I wouldn't worry too much about cloaking. The police are not going to risk their necks climbing up a power line to take out a ~$30 transmitter, unless it's to get prints or the society in question is very Orwellian (in which case, you can't make the drones anyway, because Big Brother is watching). I'd just go for transmitter which are too cheap to bother fighting against.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago> The police are not going to risk their necks climbing up a power line to take out a ~$30 transmitter But the power company might want to knock down a device that's stealing their service.
- wisty 15y agoIt's a low power device. They'd press charges if they caught you (to discourage other people doing the same thing), but it's not worth sending out counter-surveillance operatives to trace the device, then calling out a couple of linesmen to take it down simply to save power. A 60 watt device (my laptop running at full power) costs ~$70 a year. A Raspberry Pi, even with a reasonable Wifi transmitter, costs far less. And I bet the cost of power at a distribution line is less than what a consumer pays for power in their home.
- bonzoesc 15y agoAs someone who lives in a society enabled by cheap, centrally generated electric power, I'd actually kind of hope the power company would seven-figures go after somebody who steals it from their distribution network, even if it's just somebody who wants to watch Game of Thrones without HBO.
- sliverstorm 15y ago> The police are not going to risk their necks climbing up a power line to take out a ~$30 transmitter They do have varmint rifles though
- dclowd9901 15y agoMaybe I don't understand electrical engineering well enough, but wouldn't an ornithopter then also have to carry some sort of heavy duty (several hundred or thousand-pound) transformer as well?
- sliverstorm 15y agoFirst, since the power draw would be small, the transformer could be small too. Second, you could probably use solid-state devices like a regulator & rectifier combo instead of a transformer.
- mkup 15y agoNot necessarily - for example, fluorescent lamp glows near high-voltage power line, even if is not plugged in to any power source.
- DasIch 15y agoA transformer consists of two inductors that transform electricity by - you guessed it - induction. You don't need a transformer because you can just get the electricity in the correct voltage by using the right inductor. I haven't made any calculations but I would expect the battery to be bigger and of greater weight than a sufficient inductor.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoWouldn't they be stealing power, then? Going from the murky world of copyright infringement, to straight-up stealing a service seems like a pretty terrible idea.
- sliverstorm 15y agoYeah, but the further we take this into the grey area the smaller the leap will be to adding anti-personnel defense capabilities!
- pavel_lishin 15y agoWhat grey area? It's illegally tapping a power line.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- marshray 15y agoPower distribution lines are already a major inefficiency loss to the power company. It's unclear if there would be any additional parasitic loss from the recharging bot, the efficiency of the system as a whole could in fact be greater than if the bot plugged into a metered outlet. Kind of suits the piracy debate rather well actually. :-)
- A1kmm 15y agoIf you put a coil up to a HVAC line and draw current from that coil, that is going to increase the impedance of the line and reduce the amount of power that can be delivered at the other end. Yes, the energy loss would probably be tiny in proportion to the energy transmitted and the resistive loss on a power line, but it is nevertheless a real loss to the power company. It could be more efficient than plugging the bot into a metered outlet, but the power company gets paid for energy drawn from a metered outlet. By analogy, it is more efficient for a retail shop if you steal goods from their warehouse before they are stocked on the shelves than if you buy them off the shelves, but the first case is a net loss for the retail shop, while more efficient, because they don't derive any revenues, and the second case, while less efficient, leads to an increase in profit for the shop. This is quite different from piracy, which has no direct marginal cost - copyright was created to allow the recovery of fixed costs on certain types of work when there are low marginal costs to production.
- samstave 15y agoDARPA actually had a request out for bat-like UAVs that could latch onto power-lines to recharge. Here is a PDF on the subject: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Moore11.pdf http://groups.csail.mit.edu/robotics-center/public_papers/Mo...
- sophacles 15y agoDo you actually need an ornithopter? Why not just make it a powered glider (small pusher prop). The wing supports could be made of conductive materials, or infused with small wires, and the thing could just buzz along close to the wires. If you get it right, you could get more juice than you output, and when you get enough stored charge, just fly high and glide down, find updrafts, etc until power is low again and go buzzing some more.