You wouldn't attempt any of this without permission, regulatory approval and insurance, unless you wanted to be sued, prosecuted and go broke if something went wrong. How do people think the real world operates exactly?
I’m curious how you think power companies are supposed to be aware of entities leeching off transmission lines?
If people are doing this at any appreciable scale, the penalties for being caught will get ratcheted up until it's not worth it.
You only have to ruin a relatively small number of lives before people mostly choose to do what you want.
uh.. "Move fast and break things" and "It's easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission" come to mind.
The real world is certainly not your optimistic "corporations won't do anything wrong because they're afraid they'll get in trouble".
Those are the ones that you can read about on Wikipedia. There's plenty of corporate theft happening all the time that never makes it into the public eye.
I mean bro, Boeing just murdered a whistleblower. It's not like criminality is inherently a barrier for companies.
> A passively actuated gripping mechanism grasps the powerline cable during landing after which a control circuit regulates the magnetic field inside a split-core current transformer to provide sufficient holding force as well as battery recharging.
You can also take power using a capacitor instead of an inductor, from the changing voltage (not current) in an AC line. Like when you hold a florescent tube vertical under a hi-power line, and it lights up.
Creating current flows from a field is what induction is, so if you're imagining that you could just generate electricity from a field, well, that's what they're already doing. It doesn't take lowering a probe. You can just use an inductor.
https://makezine.com/article/craft/1000-fluorescent-lights-p...
I would project that the drain from all possible drone charging is orders of magnitude less than the e.g. coronal loss or the static radiation that blasts my ham radio.
Any legal action would need to be able to document that loss, one would think.
The amount could be estimated by looking at how much flying the drones do between charges, or by suing for access to charging/position telemetry of the units.
Not sure how that plays out in terms of the weight/packaging of the drone but seems feasible for at least larger drones.
I suspect we are talking about 24 watts as compared to eg 1000 megawatt 500kv line. This is seven orders of magnitude difference. Totally lost in the noise.
Effective immediately, all airspace below 500 feet near powerlines is now classified as Class M airspace (for money). If your registered drone is detected nearby, you’ll be charged per second.
This is again technically plausible but ethically irrelevant.
It's like the fallacy in: "It's OK for people to steal goods from that store, because the parent-company is very big and one theft won't even show up on their monthly financials and they've got spoilage and breakage too."
> I suspect we are talking about 24 watts
The video demonstration shows 50 watts of input.
Napkin-math: Suppose one drone uses 1000 (battery) watts flying around, and does so for 4 hours each day for a month. (Made possible by an improved version of this research that charges at 200w.) That's 4 kWH. The electrical price is $0.20/kWh.
That means siphoning $24/month for one drone. That's not a casual "keep the extra penny", that's a Netflix Premium subscription.
Napkin-math time: I see 4 motors, searching the model-number suggests each has a max draw of ~380 watts, so let's assume it averages 1000 watts in operation, for 6 hours a day, with a local cost of electricity at $0.20 per kilowatt-hour, and this continues for one month.
1000*8/1000*$0.20*30 = $36 per month per drone.
That's not give-a-penny-take-a-penny territory.
I previously pointed that out to someone in another comment, however I did not use 50 because the video-presentation continues with:
> The current in the power-line was approximately 300 amperes [...] a higher power-line current would result in a proportionally higher charging power. As future iterations of this system become more efficient, the ratio of time spent flying and time spent charging will significantly increase.
The point remains that once you reframe the electrical situation in financial terms, you will realize it is not just gleaning discarded ergs, and is instead significant enough to raise questions of theft and justice.
The vampires will be the charging drones that aren't associated with a transaction. So it's about as enforceable as a requirement that drones have accurate identifier transponders.
Understandable.
> then all the drone has to do is authenticate a valid customer id for billing
I mean you can ask for anything, but how do you police it? If the drone is by a recognisable entity doing legitimate things sure you can fine them if they don’t comply. But what do you do with literal fly-by-night operators?
The problem has three prongs: Detection: there is so much line, and much of it is away from regular eyes. Intermittent-moving threat: Imagine you get a report about a drone perching on your wires. You schedule and dispatch a team to deal with it. Most likely by the time they arrive on site the drone is gone. They are playing a catchup game with moving threats. Action: okay, you got a drone in sight. Either because it didn’t move away, or because you got lucky. What do you do? Mind you the lines are really high and poking things near them can be hazardous if not done correctly. So it is not just any Harry and Dick who can deal with the drone, you need someone trained and with the right equipment.
They really don’t care. It’s a rounding error.
Perhaps if enough drones did this, they would indeed bury the lines. But that would be strictly worse than a world in which they didn’t bury them, and drones don’t steal electricity regardless.
Who cares? If they don’t want their oil siphoned they need to be burying their pipelines anyway.
Most would agree that unauthorized draws from common infrastructure resulting in loss is theft.
Edit: 21kph is the optimal speed for max flight time but not for the best energy efficiency per km. Most efficient speed is somewhere between that and the top speed. But this is the right order of magnitude at least.
[0] https://mavicpilots.com/threads/mini-3-51-minute-flight-time...
Warning lights for aircraft which clamp onto power lines have been available for many years.[1]
[1] https://clampco.it/obstruction-light-low-intensity-type-b-se...