2008 - Odysseus solar-powered UAV can flight for 5 years without touching land Featured

Is done of 3 identical flight elements, combined in a Z structure, to optimize solar rays exposition.

Is calculated that it can flight for 5 years (unitl the batteries will end ther life) without touching the land.

This is one of the past Darpa financed projects, the direction where also recently military research about unmanned vehicles go, in the direction of Solar powered and swarms/flocks of vehicles coordinated together for larger and complex missions of surveillance in crisis, war or peace keeping area.

With such UAV in future we may have other kind of applications, for medical (long distance medicine trasportation) or telecommunication.

So it may be possible that you will make your 5GHz TP-Link router or hundreds of them flying above your house or your town in a wireless mesh?

The batteries that may be involved for such projects may be the LiFePo4 batteries, 30% lager of the conventional LiPo but very cheap, with very fast charge rate, and that can sustain 2000 charge cycles instead of a few hundreds, lasting up to 5 years.

Tired of exacopters? So you have now more models to experiments for your drones!

Last modified on Thursday, 11 December 2014 22:32
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