Hacker News Reader

Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

It won’t fly further than a headline, never a practical one. The biggest issue remains (after solving the other two) in drones now is endurance, and unless a breakthrough battery technology changes that, all these cool concepts will never materialize.

View on HN

Power line perch recharging is the solution.

Bread crumb refueling

What is that, technically speaking? Last year I was working for a company that inspects pipelines with drones. They automated land, recharge, on pedestals placed along a route.

Technically speaking, I believe that was a joke.

Ha! Touche.

The powerline perch stuff does actually work. I’m glad someone else mentioned it here already.

So the weird old lady in the park really does work for the CIA!

I think that endurance is an intrinsic limitation of drones, but I take the opposite conclusion as you. Instead of it meaning drones will never catch on, it'll mean that military missions and consequently the size and structure of the state will adjust their form to suit what drones are good at, rather than drones not catching on. In other words, we'll get drones, but we'll lose nation-states, rather than keeping nation-states but having them fail to adopt drones.

Drones' ability to absolutely dominate the battlefield inside of ~200km is just too powerful. You'll end up with small regional powers that are basically impregnable to invasion, but also can't project power because the range of drones is too short. City-states, basically. And because the defining characteristic of a state is its monopoly on physical force, the structure of the state will adapt to the dominant military technology of the time.

I am not so sure about that, before the whole weaponization of these drones, drone delivery was the hot topic, then changed to “last mile” delivery when dreams hit reality checks, then the whole “urban mobility” with all the connectivity and drones infra to land and take off, rally points, etc etc, and nothing really changed, connectivity is still a challenge, although there are plenty of work arounds (I am even building a platform that will solve a lot of nowadays drones flight issues), but the endurance? Nope, I remember we always hit this as the biggest showstopper in any mission, especially when these missions usually fly with no infra be it cellular or anything that could charge it. The only solution is scientists find a way to make lightweight high endurance batteries.

Fuel cells can provide autonomy similar to real birds, but for now they remain too expensive.

ok this wont win any green points but an RTG generator core will heat a gang of nitanol bands and drive an electric dynamo, it will also be reasonably small enought to fit in a bird sized form factor, and will be thermally hot like a biological.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radioisotope_thermoelectr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...

This is the size and sort of drones a unit would use for scouting the local area. The range isn't great, but it is suitable for that and less conspicuous than the gas-powered drones used 15 or so years ago and the buzzing quadcopters of today.

Did you fly further than the headline?

> The O1 drone weighs 1 pound and can fly up to 10 kilometers, which is a little more than 6 miles, for over an hour, according to a company fact sheet.

Yes I did, I even built similar ones before, and an hour is barely a number in real scenarios or BVLOS (add preflight post flight check, etc), plus, when you add the connectivity part (anything to allow bvlos) or pro payloads that one hour becomes 10min unless you go fuel. Robotic world has alot of over hype monkey business, don’t trust any “fact” sheet. There’s a reason why balloons are used in some part of the world to carry these drones for long distance.

Are you sure what you built was SOA? How long ago was that? How do you know it is not an hour with useful payload?

> How do you know it is not an hour with useful payload?

Until they present a much more specific claim (and preferably also supporting evidence) the prevailing assumption is that it's exaggerated bullshit.

These are winged drones. Gliding takes no energy. Maybe you're confusing drones with quadcopters?

Gliding takes no energy, but it requires many sensors and a very clever control program. I do no think that anyone has built a drone capable of long-term gliding, yet (i.e. capable to recognize thermal currents and use them for ascending and also capable of gliding a long time without losing much altitude).

Nonetheless, it should possible for a flapping-wing drone to do some short-time gliding between intervals when it uses wing flapping to ascend to the initial height, in order to save some energy.

I think battery life is a key limiter for this technology but how much time does it need? Something so small that can fly for fifteen minutes to collect intelligence et. al. might be sufficient. For example: a situation in which it is not safe to enter and detection would make it even less safe, ergo using something so tiny for only a few minutes could give valuable feedback to the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com