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Biomimetic Drones Perch on Power Lines Like Birds to Recharge

MIT researchers are working to solve a major setback of commercial drones: battery life.
Image: alisdair/Flickr

Every entrepreneur on the market today is trying to answer your economic qualms with drones: tacocopers, goose-bombers, Amazon's fleet of delivery UAVs. But each of these entrepreneurial ventures is set back by one major thing: battery life.

Almost all consumer-grade drones can't travel more than 10 miles round-trip on a single charge. Sure, that's about as far as your pizza place will deliver via manned transportation anyway, but the delivery person doesn't have to wait nearly two hours to recharge to deliver the next hot pie.

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A team of MIT researchers think they've solved this battery life quandary. They’re working on building biomimicking drones that can land on a power lines like birds and power up using inductive charging.

The team at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) started working toward this in 2010, and built a glider that could perform a post-stall pressure drag—the maneuver our avian friends perform to land on a perch. This movement creates violent vortexes behind a bird's wings that slow down its rate of acceleration, allowing it to guide its talons to its target.

Image: CSAIL

Researchers were able to recreate this move with the mechanical glider, but the drone needed the help of a room full of cameras and off-board computers to land with any precision. Maybe this could be feasible if the drones we're only ever to operate on London's security camera-lined streets, but it’s not going to cut it most places.

But, the team did manage to write an algorithm capable of predicting the glider's airfoil and directing its hook towards the wire. Yesterday they successfully demonstrated the new glider, which has enough computing power to hook onto a power line (video above).

A depiction of the glider executing its post-stall perching maneuver. Image: CSAIL

The system first detects the wire, then tells the drone's motor that it needs to slow down, while also telling it to throw its wing-tips up in the air, just like an eagle getting ready to grab its prey. As this maneuver happens and the glider’s nose is high to the sky, the computer slows down the glider's forward motion enough to precisely hook onto the wire ahead.

So should you expect to look up and see robobirds lined up on wires in the sky? Not quite. This latest work represents progress, but these charging, perching drones still have a long way to go (not to mention legal hurdles to clear) before they'll be swarming around Fire phone carriers with Amazon Prime.