Some amazing engineer built a drone that can lift its own weight using only the electric power that it gets from an on-board solar panel and nothing else (no battery).
Video: I Built a Solar Powered Drone and it WORKS by Luke Maximo Bell
Wasting the wing-effect on something like that and instead doing it as a quadcopter is seriously wasteful.
This guy’s solar powered copter is WAY cooler.
plus it can lift off all by itself. so if it wants to go on a multi-day journey, it doesn’t have to ask a passer-by to lift it up and throw it into the air to get it going.
Just don’t bring it out on a windy day or the solar panel would turn into a sail real quick
This boat can move with the power of wind alone, just using this big sheet! No motor or oars necessary! Just don’t bring it out on a windless day.
If they could add a flap and slight airfoil shape to the panel it could be an advantage in the wind.
Also if it can propel itself up post the clouds it wouldn’t have to land for days.
Yeah a partially sail powered drone does sound really neat actually. Would definitely help extend the battery life
Very interesting! If the drone can orient and bend itself into a wing/sail, there would be a lot it could do beyond just the motorised fans.
This is excellent, now pair it with a lightish battery to fill in any gaps in sun exposure and add lora and this is the start of emergency deployment of meshtastic. Imagine just tossing one of these up and it can stay up all day.
Oh and give it the ability to switch to glider mode so it can “land” without damage.
I am someone who is interested in rc planes, multirotors, and automation in general. Not an expert by any measure, but have some experience.
A hybrid quad-rotor/plane would be much better for this. They can VTOL, hover, do all the quadcopter stuff, but there’s still the usual plane motors to push the whole thing forward. The wings provide tons of lift and reduce the overall power usage of the system. Have it circle above an area until you don’t need the pop-up mesh network.
I’ve seen a few content creators like rctestflight make full solar planes, running ardupilot to fly way point missions and circle around for as long as possible.
Combining the two might reduce the overall efficiency when compared to either separately, I imagine the extra grams from the mesh radios would still allow for very long flight times.
So theoretically you should be able to toss a couple out that can circle overhead and act as super long line-of-sight relays and provide coverage over a huge area, all of which couod be deployed and packed up in minutes.
Uh no. This thing is really fragile and at the limit of what’s technologically feasible. It won’t survive in any real world application.
Yet.
Sure. Technology moves on. This sort of thing may well be commonplace in a few years.
yeah it’s really really fragile. they show it in the video, one of the panels broke because a cat stepped on it. obviously not very suited for real-world deployment.
however i do wonder why they use polycrystalline silicon and not just amorphous silicon? I mean 20% efficiency instead of 8% makes a difference but i did some rough maths and it could still work with amorphous silicon if you use the area on the drone better. But amorphous silicon has the advantage of making a very thin and flexible layer that doesn’t break easily. It’s essentially more like a flexible piece of cloth instead of a solid object. Maybe worth a consideration.
It’s still fun to think about this stuff, maybe just maybe it will be feasible in far future.
I wonder if you’d find this video interesting: RC Solar Plane Flight Duration Test
:o yeah indeed
I watched this last week and the moment where he breaks the panels by touching them is priceless.
I wonder if a large network of solar powered drones could one day be deployed to counter the affects of urban heat islands.
Yeah, that seems like a better solution than trees.
I would prefer forest canopies…
Doubt it. The energy collected by the panel is turned into thermal energy by the spinning propellers. Maybe if they can bank some of it in a battery to use later?
I meant as mobile canopies that could be deployed to shade urban areas during extreme heat events.
I honestly fail to see how this is surprising? Why shouldn’t a drone be able to that? (Genuinely asking)
Because solar panels powerful enough to run a drone are large and heavy, and/or fragile. A solar panel sufficiently lightweight to be lifted by a low power drone, and simultaneously powerful enough to supply that drone, isn’t easy
Ah, so the tricky thing is to find the balance between weight of the drone and the weight of the solar panel and its capacity, yes? I thought it sounded like “wow, look what solar power can do”, as if the actual source of the energy made any difference :)
Yeah the problem is more with the weight of the components and how little energy is in that small patch of sunlight. To provide enough thrust to hold it up is impressive, not just that a solar panel is providing power.
the thing is that the amount of power on that little patch of area is actually a lot; we just continue to underestimate it because it doesn’t feel like much. i mean, we stand under direct sunlight all day long and never feel like a train hits us. however, the amount of energy in the sunlight is quite a lot, we’re just very good at ignoring it.
because people seem to think that you need to have big areas to generate meaningful amounts of energy. this proves that’s not the case.
so like a wind-powered paper airplane
cool, but not practical
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