Toward battery-free flight: Duty cycled recharging of small drones
Nishant Elkunchwar,Suvesha Chandrasekaran,Vikram Iyer,Sawyer B. Fuller,Nishant Elkunchwar,Suvesha Chandrasekaran,Vikram Iyer,Sawyer B. Fuller
Constrained battery life on current Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones) limits the time they can operate and distance they can travel. We address this challenge by harvesting solar power to enable duty-cycled operation on a palm-sized drone. We present a scaling analysis that suggests that more solar power can be collected per unit mass of the drone as scale reduces, favoring small drones. By chargi...
