[HN Gopher] Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines
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Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines
Author : alphabetatango
Score : 143 points
Date : 2026-01-10 16:43 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ycombinator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ycombinator.com)
| Sniffnoy wrote:
| Huh, is that legal? I mean I guess it is when the power company
| is the customer, as they talk about, but otherwise?
| lkbm wrote:
| I'd assume otherwise you have to have a way for the drones to
| meter their usage and pay the power company. It will likely
| make power theft easier, but it seems entirely viable to have
| an account with the power company where you report "I drew X
| joules from line Y" and for them to bill appropriately.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That seems entirely unviable to me. Have you met... people?
|
| "Trust me, bro!" is something I wish my power company would
| do, but they installed a meter instead.
| yorwba wrote:
| What's unviable about having the power company vet the
| thing that reports "I drew X joules from line Y" like they
| would vet any other meter?
| themafia wrote:
| Does the device report directly to the power company, or
| is that data aggregated and reported in some other
| format?
|
| If it's the latter then hand editing is all it takes to
| create fraud.
| closewith wrote:
| Hand editing is all it takes to create fraud in all areas
| of business.
| lesam wrote:
| Depends. When millions are on the line between companies,
| people are surprisingly willing to take a hand-created
| excel file as 'proof'. For example:
| https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/tricolors-
| excel-g...
| notahacker wrote:
| Feels like this is likely to be targeting government and
| major corporate clients, in which case they're probably in
| a strong place to negotiate agreements based on charge
| reported by the drone's on board software. Not to mention
| the utility companies themselves, who are mentioned as the
| initial market.
| bri3d wrote:
| Unmetered electric service based on "trust me bro" is
| actually the default (at least in the US) for a huge
| variety of devices, like streetlights, cell towers mounted
| to electric poles, public irrigation systems, etc etc.
|
| Almost every US utility has a "UM" process to self-assess
| an unmetered load's consumption and be billed. So, yes,
| it's not only viable but widespread.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Unmetered electric service based on "trust me bro" is
| actually the default (at least in the US) for a huge
| variety of devices
|
| I wouldn't talk too loud about this or you will ruin it
| for all of us. If I discover the street lights on my
| street mine botcoins I will blame you.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| B2B transactions like this are handled fine with contracts
| and lawyers all the time, I doubt it would be an issue. In
| the worst case, the utility could own the recharging module
| on the drone, just like they own your power meter.
| echelon wrote:
| They'll use this narrative to fundraise and build. Then
| they'll build their own distributed charging infra that
| becomes a moat.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| The simplest might be for the drone company to act as an
| intermediary. They'd bill drone users for charging and have
| contracts with utilities. The drone company could do some
| authentication / DRM / etc. so that you'd basically have to
| jailbreak your drone to charge without paying.
|
| Yes, I'm sure the markup would be large as a percentage, but
| for most customers the convenience would be worth it. Most of
| the customers are probably commercial and don't want to risk
| getting banned or sued.
| _qua wrote:
| Presumably they'd be doing inspections for the power company,
| who probably don't care if some minuscule amounts of power are
| consumed directly during operations.
| znnajdla wrote:
| There is a not so subtle hint in the description that they were
| mainly inspired by military applications (Air Force, DARPA).
| Legality doesn't matter when you're in enemy territory.
| galkk wrote:
| The drones heavier than 250g already must transmit remote id
| quickthrowman wrote:
| You can install electric fencing beneath high voltage
| transmission lines and it will be energized for 'free'.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Liability is probably the biggest issue, rather than using the
| energy. If it causes damage because it fails to connect
| properly, or if it has a trailing wire to pick up other phases
| (not actually connect to it but to pick up induction)
| parpfish wrote:
| Fuel for the "birds arent real" pseudo conspiracy
| Redster wrote:
| Lol, yes. I came here to say, "This technology has been around
| for years in birds. /s"
| mikrl wrote:
| If this works via induction could you even eliminate the need for
| the drones to land?
|
| Assuming flight conditions are good, there would be a region
| around the wire (line of charge) with an electric/magnetic field
| that the drones could use, any shielding notwithstanding.
| Ccecil wrote:
| That was my thought as well...I suppose there may be something
| I am not thinking of. Perhaps they get more total energy if
| they "perch" on the tower.
| bentcorner wrote:
| My gut says there's something like an inverse-square law that
| governs how far away they can effectively charge.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's exactly the inverse square law.
|
| You get a million times more power if you can put a coil
| 1mm away from the wire than if you hover 1 meter away.
| japaget wrote:
| It's actually an inverse first power law, assuming that the
| distance of the drone from the wire is much less than the
| length of the wire. The inverse square law applies only to
| a point source of electrical energy, to a sphere, or to an
| object whose largest dimension is much less than the
| distance to the drone.
| TomatoCo wrote:
| It'll definitely charge faster, if only because it's drawing
| less power to stay up and getting closer. The only question
| is, is it like 10% or 100% faster?
| stavros wrote:
| Drones consume something like 100W to stay in the air
| (ballpark, of course), so they'd probably never charge if
| they had to hover.
| jacquesm wrote:
| More like 190W / Kg.
| abraae wrote:
| Yes, feels like perching via some insulated "feet" and only
| using energy for stabilisation (as opposed to flight) would
| allow the drone to get very cloe (and suck much more power)
| from the line.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Coupling falls off rapidly with distance. It's why a thick
| enough phone case will interfere with magnetic charging, and
| that's only on the scale of a few millimeters.
|
| Drones consume a lot of power while in flight. You can get a
| little bit of power out of powerlines standing underneath them
| with some tricks, but it's not enough to keep a drone in
| flight. At least not without something prohibitively large to
| couple to the line.
|
| It's also risky to hover near a stationary object because the
| longer you hover, the more you're exposed to the risk of a wind
| gust knocking you into the nearby obstacle.
| chrneu wrote:
| iirc efficiency loss in wireless energy transmission is
| exponential? someone correct me. But basically after just a few
| mm the losses are so great that the amount of electricity
| needed becomes ridiculously wasteful.
|
| to power a running drone at more than a few inches would be
| just...a lot.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Inverse square, so each time the distance doubles the power
| density drops by a factor of four.
| ck2 wrote:
| I remember a demo where fluorescent tubes will glow, sometimes
| brightly, near high-power transmission lines
| roywiggins wrote:
| Goes back a long way:
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nikola_Tesla_holding...
|
| > The bulb is a prototype "fluorescent" light he invented
| consisting of a partially evacuated glass bulb with a single
| metal electrode. Nearby, probably behind the curtain, there is
| one of his Tesla coil high voltage oscillators which produces a
| radio frequency electric field. The electric field ionizes the
| gas in the bulb, causing it to glow similar to a neon light.
| This photo is a 2 second time exposure taken by the light of
| the bulb
| Animats wrote:
| Yes. That should be done along hiking and biking trails under
| power lines. There's one in Silicon Valley along the bay shore
| line. The fluorescent tubes don't wear out; the filaments at
| the end are not in use. Just slip them inside polycarbonate
| tubes.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| https://collidecolludecollaborate.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/f...
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00l1slw < although its not
| available at the moment
| metalman wrote:
| what could go wrong?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| As long as they can cover the liability when inevitably one of
| this sets off a wildfire in California that costs Billions. (I
| think it's a cool idea if done right, they are after all trying
| to fix the problem of wildfires anyway which makes me hopeful)
| johndevor wrote:
| I mean, they'd also fix fire detection as well.
| jkestner wrote:
| 1. Start more fires
|
| 2. Find more fires
|
| 3. Profit
|
| Like any good startup.
| themafia wrote:
| > Removing battery swaps is the last step to deploy UAVs
| autonomously at scale.
|
| I can't say, as a citizen, that I'm particularly excited about
| this.
|
| > Autonomous drones can deliver over 20x the inspection coverage
| for the same cost.
|
| And we have 20x the manpower to review this footage? I wonder if
| you're just generating a bunch of data that cannot be practically
| used.
|
| "More coverage" isn't always the best answer. "Better informed
| coverage" is probably the problem to solve here. Aside from that
| what is the maintenance interval on those drones? How does that
| incorporate into this system?
|
| I think this is solving the problem in the wrong direction.
| rsyring wrote:
| > And we have 20x the manpower to review this footage?
|
| I was involved with a startup that did inspections of power
| generation windmills. The computer vision anomaly detection was
| really good and that was about five years ago. The goal was to
| have the automated visual inspections route images with
| suspected anomalies to humans for review and it was working
| well the last time I heard.
|
| Compared to having a human who needs to rappel down to the
| blades for a manual inspection, this is a huge productivity and
| safety boost.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Gosh I hope my house isn't inspection coverage
| dgacmu wrote:
| We do semi-automated analysis of imagery of things like utility
| right-of-ways and it's pretty scalable. We triage the vast
| majority of images automatically and then surface a small
| subset to human experts to review, but it's much, much faster
| than having the experts be in the field, while having high
| coverage. (Most images are really boring.)
|
| And in most cases of inspection, you need to look at the stuff
| anyway, so any cost reduction is very welcome. And if you do
| increase the total coverage volume while reducing human time,
| you get a double benefit of being able to provide more granular
| information, either in time or in space, which can often be
| useful.
|
| (And as a commenter below notes - this all works pretty well
| with several year old CNNs. We use a limited amount of image-
| LLM stuff to surface things zero-shot, but a lot of what we end
| up doing is a very conventional classifier with a lot of
| engineering work to make it very fast for the experts to see
| only the important things.)
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Why would humans be reviewing footage?
|
| I've worked on similar systems for oil & gas that combined
| hyperspectral imaging and LIDAR. The analysis of data collected
| by drones was fully automated. It was at least as effective as
| humans at detecting anomalies (something which was thoroughly
| verified prior to adoption).
|
| The more thorough coverage, potential issues being detected
| much earlier, and increased automation greatly reduced the
| total manpower required. Humans only came into the picture when
| the drones found a problem that needed mitigation. Humans have
| long been the bottleneck for finding operational risks and
| issues before they turn into a headline. The more humans you
| can remove from that loop the bigger the win.
|
| This was years ago, the tech has only improved.
| libertyit wrote:
| Great name
| anfractuosity wrote:
| Remember seeing this a little while ago too -
| https://www.fastcompany.com/91089861/this-genius-vampire-dro...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-uekD6VTIQ has a video of their
| drone on a power line.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Discussed april/may 2024
|
| "'Vampire drone' can leech electricity from power lines to live
| forever" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40317484
|
| "Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted
| Drone Operations" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39945733
| artemonster wrote:
| Can someone please tell how? Touching a power cable is not a
| closed circuit
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Induction
| alright2565 wrote:
| It can be a closed circuit when using AC instead of DC.
|
| Remember that the primary and secondary side of transformers
| never touch.
| BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 wrote:
| This will open a giant can of worms. Hobbyists, bad actors and
| military will be taking advantage.
| pix128 wrote:
| Maybe it'll lead the US burying their power lines
| throwaway5370x wrote:
| The drones will just start digging then
| chrneu wrote:
| lol never gonna happen.
|
| I live in the PNW of the US where many fires have been
| started by transformers exploding or whatnot.
|
| Basically every community that has a fire as a result of
| transmission lines rebuilds them above ground/on poles. Just
| last month I was going through Detroit, Oregon and their 2-3
| year old power lines were all down because of the wind storm.
| Detroit had a transformer explode a few years ago and it took
| out much of the community. They immediately rebuilt above
| ground.
|
| They'll rebuild them on poles again.
| pests wrote:
| Where I stay in Florida they have been burying all the
| lines after the last few hurricanes, thankfully.
| mothballed wrote:
| The cost to do that is unimaginably high.
| paganel wrote:
| This is built especially with the military thought as the
| primary client.
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| Which is upsetting.
| paganel wrote:
| I fully agree, but this is the world we live in right now.
| BanAntiVaxxers wrote:
| Also known as "stealing"
| wolfi1 wrote:
| in my country this is considered theft and it is punishable by
| law considered you don't have a contract with the provider
| exegete wrote:
| That might be why the first customers are utilities themselves.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| I hope so, and that there are no other people using them,
| exploiting this ability
| donpark wrote:
| It's just a technology that can be used for both civilian and
| military applications, not only by private entities.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| if you don't have a contract with the utility you almost
| certainly violate the law, at least in Europe, but then again
| I don't know what the US regulation is
| bell-cot wrote:
| > Power utilities are the perfect first customer.
|
| Sounds like having contracts with the power companies is their
| #1 goal.
| wolfi1 wrote:
| if so, all is fine. but if there are other entities using it
| they need a contract with the utility
| eh_why_not wrote:
| > Removing battery swaps is the last step to deploy UAVs
| autonomously at scale.
|
| So ubiquitous surveillance, literally overhead, without any need
| to have a nearby/local charging/physical-management station/crew?
|
| > After power companies, we will service rail, road, telecom,
| real estate and other inspection markets.
|
| Oh?
|
| > After building drones for the Air Force and DARPA, ...
|
| Oh
| mandeepj wrote:
| Great idea! Why i never thought of that?
|
| Could robo taxis steal the idea and get recharged w/o going back
| to base station? They can eject a rod similar to an E-train or
| how a military plane get refilled.
| thesz wrote:
| This is perfect for (pretty much) stealthy energy stealing.
| bmitch3020 wrote:
| I'm surprised this isn't already happening in Ukraine. They could
| fly small surveillance drones deep in enemy territory, perch on a
| power line, and send back lots of data. Not just video, but also
| sound and triangulating signals. This would also be useful in fog
| by monitoring major roads where high altitude drones and
| satellites would be obstructed.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The radio links and navigation are the hard parts.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I'm not like a drone-i-ologist or nothin, but from what I
| gather, both sides have gotten really good at detecting and
| jamming drone communication in the Ukraine/Russia conflict,
| which would probably make that a tough use case. I've read that
| the newer attack drones are controlled by a reaaallly long,
| reaaalllyy thin fiber optic line!
| vhcr wrote:
| The idea would be to use autonomous drones, so they wouldn't
| need to communicate, the problem would be that the GPS signal
| is jammed.
| bmitch3020 wrote:
| A jammed drone that's perched on a power line wouldn't fall
| out of the sky, and doesn't need to transmit 24x7, only when
| it detects some activity. The lack of a signal from it would
| itself be a signal of where the next attack is coming from.
| Anti-jamming weapons (missiles and autonomous drones) would
| also be useful, that lock on to any signal jamming sources
| and deliver the munitions directly to the target that's
| advertising itself.
| mycall wrote:
| Those fiber optic lines only work 50-60% of the time. Often
| the drones are carried 20km on foot into position which sucks
| as you know half the equipment on your back won't work.
| snowmobile wrote:
| How do they not work? Just fail in transmitting data
| completely? Do you have a link to learn more about this?
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| Cable breaks
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| New attack models are using shielded electronics that don't
| need GPS and are immune to traditional jamming. Relying on
| computer vision and old school navigation math.
|
| Go ~X speed for Y distance(+/-) on Z heading until you reach
| A landmark and then start a new set of instructions.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| as soon as it sends RF it'll be located and destroyed.
|
| There has been lots of work to make fibre connected drones, so
| that they can't be located as easily (also the pilot)
| bmitch3020 wrote:
| There's also powerline communication that these drones could
| use, relaying a signal to a second drone perched back in
| friendly territory. And if the military is going around
| blowing up all of their power transmission lines, that's also
| going to hurt them.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| How many intact and tactically relevant cross border
| transmission lines between Ukraine and Russia can there be?
| browsingonly wrote:
| Use the transmission lines to link up with an RF node to
| hand off. Friendly territory might just be some place
| without good Russian internal security coverage (perhaps
| deeper in Russia rather than towards the front lines if
| the node uses satcom).
|
| A friend of mine worked on a covert comms system for the
| Rangers to use in the Battle For Berlin that thankfully
| never occurred. The idea was to clamp onto plumbing,
| fences, and similar infrastructure where possible. Nodes
| with radios handed off to other comms systems. It worked
| reasonably well in tests but I don't know that it went
| anywhere, point is that the theory is sound.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| I wonder if the power line could be damaged if they dry to
| take out the drone?
| gingersnap wrote:
| This must be illegal in so many ways
| choosenick wrote:
| Awesome name for the company 10/10
| kulahan wrote:
| Maybe this is silly to complain about, but how would power
| companies charge these drone companies for electricity
| consumption? Seems... just so easy to steal?
| mothballed wrote:
| The proposed initial use case is use as inspection drones for
| the power company themselves.
| sowbug wrote:
| When I was a kid, we had a neighbor who had somehow wrapped
| some wire around the power lines enough times to siphon off an
| interesting amount of power. I never saw the wire myself, so it
| might not have actually happened. But people certainly talked
| about doing it way back when.
| ikidd wrote:
| We had a neighbor that put loops of wire under a 600kV line
| and got enough power to run a water pump for cows. The square
| law makes that kind of thing pretty low-return.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Can anyone more knowledgeable explain how this works?
|
| Is it harvesting energy from the magnetic field (via induction),
| or does it extracts its energy from the electric field instead?
|
| And does the drone just happen to land on the power line for
| saving energy while doing so, or is the contact necessary
| somehow?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I would guess that its just a coil thats near the cable.
| however I can't imagine its actually that much power, as the
| field isn't that strong.
|
| _but_ at 33kv, you start to get corona discharge, which gives
| you a potential difference, so that might be the mechanism they
| get power.
|
| (thats a wild guess. )
|
| _Edit_ I did some more digging, induction appears to be
| magnetic induction, long cables do produce a magnetic field,
| but not that much (unless you put it in a coil)
|
| Capacitive coupling is much more effective at high voltage.
| kuon wrote:
| Balisor[1] usually uses capacitive coupling, but it require a
| long parallel cable.
|
| Some lamps do use induction, like this one[2].
|
| I guess it uses induction looking at the drone, it also works
| with an open coil.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balisor
|
| [2]: https://www.delta-box.com/en/marking/bht-marking-light-
| for-h...
| silexia wrote:
| This is one of those brilliant ideas that seems like it should
| have been obvious in retrospect. Questions:
|
| Do the drones need transformers? Won't those be heavy?
|
| Don't the drones need a way to circulate the electricity? IE have
| a path to ground?
| avodonosov wrote:
| I've been wondering for several years why no-one does this yet.
| bawolff wrote:
| Lol. Isn't this exactly the premise of the "birds aren't real"
| conspiracy theory?
|
| https://youtu.be/3VEkzweBJPM?si=_5hCR8AE1Ii3sI-l
| DANmode wrote:
| Hopefully all of the perfect engineering candidates who
| previously worked in this specific space (autonomous line
| inspection at an industrial scale) live in San
| Francisco...............
|
| Seems odd that this would be all in-person roles. Not the most
| apparent path to relevant talent.
| password4321 wrote:
| Anyone tried solar powered drones with charge weeks hiding on
| roofs between travel hops?
| cramcgrab wrote:
| Nuclear drones!
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Well, at the very least, we now have a pre-built charging network
| for drones. Something that would have taken decades to build
| manually
| jeffbee wrote:
| This seems like a solution looking for a problem. If the power
| companies were satisfied about the safety issues of this idea,
| which are obviously many and severe, then they would also be
| satisfied with simply mounting a charging platform for the drone
| atop the tower or pole where the HV line runs, which cuts out a
| lot of the uncertainty regarding the drone's autonomous guidance.
|
| Also, the whole idea triggers my reflexive skepticism about any
| technology that seeks to remove the last human from the system.
| Usually there are exponentially increasing costs to removing the
| next human, and at some point it's not worth it. People want
| (wanted) to make sealed, autonomous data centers maintained by
| robots and it just isn't worth it. Even in manufacturing where
| robotic automation is ubiquitous and advanced there are still
| tons of humans.
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