Battery-Free Drone Designed to Fly as Long as the Sun Shines

The father and son team behind the world's fastest quadcopter we featured last year has now built what essentially looks like a flying photovoltaic panel, in a bid to create a drone that's powered by solar alone.

Oour coverage today is an attempt to build a multi-rotor flyer that could stay aloft as long as there was sunshine above it. We've previously seen research projects aimed at achieving exactly that, but they had solar cells charging onboard batteries. The Bell team wanted to leave batteries out of the equation.

The relatively easy part of the puzzle is the drone itself, which is made up of an X-frame made from carbon fiber tubing, lightweight Antigravity motors and 18-inch carbon fiber props from T-Motor plus other bits and pieces like the flight controller and 3D-printed mounts. There are also small cameras dotted around to feed a POV VR headset.

Some 27 very fragile panels – a couple broke during gentle testing, and more proved no match for the family cat – were connected in series, for a combined output of around 150 watts during ground tests. These were mounted to a support structure made up of 3-mm carbon fiber tubes, and the whole shebang bolted to the drone's X-frame.

This part of the project concluded with the Bells carefully packing everything into a vehicle and heading out to an open field for real-world testing. There's a bunch more detail about the build in the video below, where you can witness its first flight on 100% solar power – no batteries, no caps.

Naturally, such a drone is unlikely to find a practical use as is. But as a "what if" engineering project it's fascinating. And if previous form is anything to go by, we probably won't have to wait too long for a new and improved version to take to the skies. In the meantime, well done fellas.

Source: New Atlas