Drone Charging from Power Lines! 🔋

Drone Charging from Power Lines! 🔋

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[thomasknight]

Oh great, fucking skynet will never run out of batteries now.

[Skinwalkershitalker]

“We attack the drones at dawn, while they’re charging “😂

[scootalong]

This seems totally legal, I’ll have to start powering my house like this

[aurawesttarot]

Eventually you will have 1000 drones clumped up on the powerlines like bats

[vanknightplayz]

Tapping illegally on wires is wildin
Answer to your replies, just like how a transformer works, still consumes power. But primary coil is less than 1 loop and secondary is alot. A little but still there

[AnOwlfie]

First we had rechargeable pigeons, now this. Great.

[sdu_diii]

Thanks for featuring our research at the University of Southern Denmark.

[BVPl]

Amazon Drones gonna start harvesting free energy 😂

[TheLikeys]

I guess what most people seem to miss, the grid infrastructure companies would probably only allow their own maintenance drones to do that ;) they’re used to inspect power lines and masts and that would actually make a compelling use case for this tech

[Get_yotted]

Power companies sending people out to shoot it down: The hell you think you’re doing?

[sheldonmurphy]

Just like UFO recharging over nuclear sites! 😂

This is amazing though!

[lucasdio]

Only came here to point out the smiley face in the clouds. Carry on.

[kritikuz]

People : "so, why the electricity run out?"
Government : "drones"

[DrFunkman]

Got that power straight from “Fell off a Truck-Mart”

[Reyhank]

Finally someone figure it out, instead of trying to improve the battery which is hard we already got plenty of power hanging in the air already

[lessanderfer]

I saw a lot of comments about how it was not tapping the Line, which shows just how little people understand Electricity and Magnetic Fields.

Yes, there is a Magnetic Field that expands past the Cable, and it alternates that bubble, 60 times a second. Which means, the Field Expands and Contracts as electricity travels through the line. A little energy will always be lost in the process, but it is considered within tolerance and/or negligible.

Now if you put something to catch that expanding and contracting Magnetic Field, that is called, Induction, it is literally how Transformers work. It transfers energy from the coil in the Cable, to the coil in the Drone.

So it may be a small amount, but it is robbing power from the Line.

[ChiemgauerAgrarvideos]

In Germany, you would definitely get 50 reports, 10 house searches and have the SWAT team called out 5 times for illegal electricity theft....

[Alec]

Wow a lot of misinformation in the comments.

You are actively adding load to the grid by doing this not using wasted energy, moral or not, if it’s not your power to take then it’s stealing.

Basically this is just a simple AC transformer with the cable as the primary and the drone’s clamp as the secondary.
When you load the secondary it loads the primary.


Deeper explanation:

When the drone wraps a coil around the power line, it’s forming a loosely coupled transformer. The high-voltage AC current in the power line (primary winding) creates a time-varying magnetic field, which induces a voltage in the drone’s coil (secondary winding). However, for the drone to extract usable power, it must have a load (e.g., its battery charging circuit), which means it draws current in the secondary coil. This current, in turn, creates a counteracting magnetic field that slightly increases the demand on the power line—just like how any transformer with a connected load increases the load on the primary circuit.

The claim that it’s using “otherwise lost energy” is misleading. Power lines do emit some electromagnetic energy as losses (e.g., due to imperfect insulation and radiation), but the drone’s coil isn’t just capturing that—it’s actually drawing additional power from the grid. The utility company (and ultimately the consumers) are paying for that energy, even if the impact is small.

So while the drone is cleverly using the principle of inductive power transfer, it’s not just scavenging wasted energy—it’s actively pulling power from the system, like any other electrical load.

[cup_and_cone]

The only way for this to be practical would be if the drone latches on and then shuts down for an extended period. It's catch 22. The average delivery or utility drone uses a couple thousand watts continuous power. You cannot get a couple thousands watts from that small of an induction charger - you would need massively heavy coils that it cannot lift, and if it could, it would draw more power.

[Lesminster]

It's stealing power, essentially. Brilliant project xD