Hi flyers,
I need your opinion on a new technology we have developed for the UAV community. We have a connectorless charging runway mat that you can land your UAV on and charge it anywhere. All that would be needed to use this is a small receiver retrofit kit that attaches to your aircraft. We are working on an affordable price point for this type of technology. I would like to hear from everyone on their opinions and would you pay between $99-$199 for this? (see photo below for sample)
Thank you!
best, Sandie
Comments
We have made some calculations in this area, but we came to conclusion, that it is not very effective. If you want to come close to charging currents of common drone batteries (over 5000mAh) the inductor on board will be too heavy for this benefit.
One thing I've been playing with is fully-automated missions, where a UAV gets a mission sent to it, arms, takes off, flies the mission, and comes back and lands. For this to be fully automated, it needs to be sitting on a charging pad at the beginning, and return to it at the end. A Qi-style charging pad seems like it would be cool for this.
I don't see why inductive charging would be any better than just landing on a pad with a direct connection system.
That is, I don't see any advantage to not just directly making a connection through the skids. A wireless system would just slow charging down, add weight, and add cost to the system.
On-going commercial autonomous operations will require self-charing functionality. Your post is a bit light on details, but if you can prove your technlology, there's a market for it.
I will try to poke holes at your idea too. Personally, I just change the batteries when I fly for fun, I would not want to wait 10-15 minutes for charging. People doing photography or monitoring (the biggest commercial use for small UAVs now) are mostly doing the same. With good connectors, swapping the batteries is faster than landing on a small area. I check my quad anyway after each flight, and I think that is common sense. I assume that for a completly autonomous operation, your idea would be very useful, but the technology and regulations are not there yet, as there is still someone behind the commands just in case.
Interesting project! At Skysense (http://www.skysense.de) we developed a charging station for drones for professional use. We will shortly come up with a more convenient edition which price point will be around 100$.
Copyrighted photo and photoshop does not equal new technology to me. :-(
Electric concrete? Did you have permission of SOS Concrete of Houston, TX to use their sample driveway image for superimposing your drone and charging strip?
<:-p
http://sosconcrete.com/
http://sosconcrete.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/concrete-driveway...
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