GET Corp Wireless Drone Charging

[EEVblog]

http://getcorp.com/technology-overview/#tab-542

80% efficiency at 10's of meters at 500W-30kW 
Bullshit

[Cyberdragon]

It appears to be a form of Tesla system, which does work. But of course, that type of system can't even touch any of their claims.

A wireless drone system is possible but it will require huge transmitters and have poor efficiency and distance, the only application would be a situation where a craft needs to stay airborne all the time and can never land.

[BrianHG]

I don't see 10's of meters.  They are flying that drone inside a circular transformer as you can see the outer 6 white coiled wire mounted in the room around the fly area making the outer ring of a transformer, while the drone sits inside with it's copper colored coil ring around it's frame.  I only see around 2-3 meters distance circle around the drone where it pretty much needs to fly in the middle to charge up.  The diameter of that outer wire circle may be 10 meters.  But, as usual, you can see how engineers like to play with semantics here to make it sound amazingly huge.

This is still seriously valuable for extended range drone delivery applications like what Amazon & couriers wants to do where Amazon can have 1 depot, with multiple charging stations on numerous roof-tops within a city where you pause delivery to charge the drones once every 10 minutes of flight or so...

This company has a chance to make it big, even if the efficiency sucks.

[helius]

For the suggested use case, a battery-swapping machine would be more compact and provide faster turnaround.

[janoc]

For the suggested use case, a battery-swapping machine would be more compact and provide faster turnaround.

And be incredibly mechanically complicated and require expensive maintenance. Renault has tried that for their electric cars - and quickly shelved the idea after a few prototypes because of this. Granted, drone battery is much smaller/lower voltage than a car one but it doesn't make the problem significantly simpler.

That doesn't mean this company's system is better but wireless charging as such would be a lot simpler and less maintenance intensive (= cheaper) than any battery swapping thing.

[Cyberdragon]

It's probably not a magnetically coupled system, it's probably an RF based system.

[Marco]

And be incredibly mechanically complicated and require expensive maintenance. Renault has tried that for their electric cars - and quickly shelved the idea after a few prototypes because of this. Granted, drone battery is much smaller/lower voltage than a car one but it doesn't make the problem significantly simpler.

A delivery bot would already have to pick up and securely connect to the package, so what's one more package?

[BrianHG]

And be incredibly mechanically complicated and require expensive maintenance. Renault has tried that for their electric cars - and quickly shelved the idea after a few prototypes because of this. Granted, drone battery is much smaller/lower voltage than a car one but it doesn't make the problem significantly simpler.

A delivery bot would already have to pick up and securely connect to the package, so what's one more package?

It only needs to drop off a package.  A human can attack the package.
The package has no wiring to contend with and the necessary weatherproof guaranteed always perfect high amperage contacts.

[Marco]

It's probably not a magnetically coupled system

It's LF, relative to the >km wavelength the 20-30 meter loop is nothing. So it probably is inductive coupling.

PS. for a drone battery pack it would be quite easy to make a high power inductive or capacitive power coupling too if you wanted to avoid plugs.