This Solar-Powered Drone Will Watch You All Day
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The Silent Falcon is small enough to be launched by hand. Photo credit: Silent Falcon
In a development sure to confound advocates of green power, a New Mexico startup has introduced the Silent Falcon, a six-foot-long unmanned aircraft that can be launched by hand and conduct surveillance for up to 14 hours by drawing most of its power from the sun.
It isn’t available yet and comes with a $250,000 to $300,000 price tag, but the creator is getting expressions of interest from government agencies, particularly law enforcement, who could find many uses for a tiny plane that beams back high-definition video and is silent from a distance of 100 feet.
The Silent Falcon was unveiled on August 6 at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems conference in Las Vegas. The target customer isn’t the U.S. military, which already has entrenched suppliers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), said CEO John Brown in an interview Wednesday. Instead, the company has sought to sell to private military contractors working for the U.S. as well as foreign militaries in countries such as India, Thailand and Brazil.
But interest in drones in the U.S. is growing so fast that it may be time to retool the business plan.
The UAV has thin and lightweight solar panels on its wing. Photo credit: Silent Falcon
Brown ticked off a list of possible uses of domestic drones that reveals how they might zoom across economic sectors, as well as raise thorny issues for privacy. He sees potential customers among law enforcement on the city, state and federal level, as well as the U.S. Border Patrol. An eye in the sky could be used to interdict drugs, size up needs in disaster relief, ensure port security, check power lines and fuel pipelines, fight forest fires and count wildlife, Brown said. The company is waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to finalize its rules on the use of drones in U.S. skies.
The domestic market is “not going to be an enormous market opportunity in the next year or two, but we believe it’s an enormous market opportunity down the line and we want to be part of it,” Brown said.
Adding lightweight solar panels to the wings of a UAV may be a game-changer. One of Silent Falcon’s main competitors is Aerovironment, whose line of small, battery-operated UAVs include the Puma AE (with a maximum flight time of two hours), the Raven (90 minutes), and the Wasp AE (50 minutes).
In full daylight, the Silent Falcon claims a flight time of between six and 14 hours. The wings are covered with a sheet of thin-film solar panels, which produce less power than the polycrystalline solar panels found on buildings, but are very lightweight. They feed a battery that on its own could keep the craft aloft for four to six hours.
Adding flight time to the craft is a matter of choosing longer wings that can hold more solar panels. Three models of wing vary in length from 7 to 17 feet.
The electric motor that holds the craft aloft is supposed to be inaudible from a distance of 100 feet and is optimized for a “loiter speed” of 18 to 20 knots, a velocity at which the drone does what is intended to do — hang around and watch. Cameras are both high-definition and infrared for night use, mounted in a pectoral fin on the plane’s belly.
Silent Falcon is the newly-minted name for Bye Aerospace, a company founded in 2008 to create alternative power for aircraft. It has six employees and contracts six to eight engineers from Bye Engineering. The Albuquerquecompany has received $1.5 million in venture funding from 30 investors and is seeking $1.5 million more, Brown said.
Another project in the pipeline is the Snipe, a similar drone that would be mounted with guns.
Powering Up The Drones With Solar Energy
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The Silent Falcon is small enough to be launched by hand. Photo credit: Silent Falcon
In a development sure to confound advocates of green power, a New Mexico startup has introduced the Silent Falcon, a six-foot-long unmanned aircraft that can be launched by hand and conduct surveillance for up to 14 hours by drawing most of its power from the sun.
It isn’t available yet and comes with a $250,000 to $300,000 price tag, but the creator is getting expressions of interest from government agencies, particularly law enforcement, who could find many uses for a tiny plane that beams back high-definition video and is silent from a distance of 100 feet.
The Silent Falcon was unveiled on August 6 at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems conference in Las Vegas. The target customer isn’t the U.S. military, which already has entrenched suppliers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), said CEO John Brown in an interview Wednesday. Instead, the company has sought to sell to private military contractors working for the U.S. as well as foreign militaries in countries such as India, Thailand and Brazil.
But interest in drones in the U.S. is growing so fast that it may be time to retool the business plan.
The UAV has thin and lightweight solar panels on its wing. Photo credit: Silent Falcon
Brown ticked off a list of possible uses of domestic drones that reveals how they might zoom across economic sectors, as well as raise thorny issues for privacy. He sees potential customers among law enforcement on the city, state and federal level, as well as the U.S. Border Patrol. An eye in the sky could be used to interdict drugs, size up needs in disaster relief, ensure port security, check power lines and fuel pipelines, fight forest fires and count wildlife, Brown said. The company is waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to finalize its rules on the use of drones in U.S. skies.
The domestic market is “not going to be an enormous market opportunity in the next year or two, but we believe it’s an enormous market opportunity down the line and we want to be part of it,” Brown said.
Adding lightweight solar panels to the wings of a UAV may be a game-changer. One of Silent Falcon’s main competitors is Aerovironment, whose line of small, battery-operated UAVs include the Puma AE (with a maximum flight time of two hours), the Raven (90 minutes), and the Wasp AE (50 minutes).
In full daylight, the Silent Falcon claims a flight time of between six and 14 hours. The wings are covered with a sheet of thin-film solar panels, which produce less power than the polycrystalline solar panels found on buildings, but are very lightweight. They feed a battery that on its own could keep the craft aloft for four to six hours.
Adding flight time to the craft is a matter of choosing longer wings that can hold more solar panels. Three models of wing vary in length from 7 to 17 feet.
The electric motor that holds the craft aloft is supposed to be inaudible from a distance of 100 feet and is optimized for a “loiter speed” of 18 to 20 knots, a velocity at which the drone does what is intended to do — hang around and watch. Cameras are both high-definition and infrared for night use, mounted in a pectoral fin on the plane’s belly.
Silent Falcon is the newly-minted name for Bye Aerospace, a company founded in 2008 to create alternative power for aircraft. It has six employees and contracts six to eight engineers from Bye Engineering. The Albuquerquecompany has received $1.5 million in venture funding from 30 investors and is seeking $1.5 million more, Brown said.
Another project in the pipeline is the Snipe, a similar drone that would be mounted with guns.
Advances in solar cell technology can make drones a more powerful tool not only for the battlefield but also for civilian uses, such as firefighting, crop surveying and oil and gas field monitoring. A Silicon Valley startup called Alta Devices has been working with AeroVironment to engineer a drone that can stay airborne longer and carry out missions that are impossible before.
The result of the collaboration is a 13-pound prototype drone that can fly for 9 hours and 11 minutes, AeroVironment announced recently. The military contractor credited its new battery and Alta’s solar technology for the feat. A drone similar to the one by AeroVironment typically can fly for one or two hours before it has to land and recharge, said Chris Norris, Alta’s CEO. AeroVironment’s new battery is good for three hours. By embedding Alta’s ultra thin and highly efficient solar cells on the aircraft, the battery is able to recharge twice before daylight fades and keeps the drone in the air three times longer, Norris added.
California-based AeroVironment is still tinkering with the design of the drone, which is part of its Puma AE line. It plans to roll out a design that it could produce and sell in early 2014.
Adding solar energy to the design could help AeroVironment win contracts. A drone that flies longer could carry out lengthier assignments and reduce its operating cost. Launched by hand (you fire up the motor, hold the drone up and then toss it into the air), the drone usually doesn’t land gracefully. Its motor is designed to turn off when it reaches a certain altitude, and then it hits the ground and glides to a stop. More often than not, though, the impact causes some parts to break off.
“Landing is a traumatic event for these aircrafts,” Norris said. Drone operators often bring many spare parts to the field. A drone that can stay in the air longer would be able to do more work before it has to land and undergo repairs. How much money the new design could save would depend on how much the advanced battery and solar cells adds to the price of the drone and the cost of operating and maintaining it.
Designing a solar-powered drone isn’t just about slapping on as many solar cells as possible, though maximizing the use of the available space is certainly a key consideration. One factor to consider is the weight and efficiency of solar cells. The vast majority of the solar cells produced today are too thick and heavy or not terribly efficient for use by a drone, which needs to stay lightweight and nimble while carrying a camera or other equipment. Adding weight will require more battery power to operate.Alta’s cells, made with gallium-arsenide, are 1 micron thick, compared with the common 180-micron silicon cells that you find in most of the solar panels on the rooftop today. Alta’s cells also are more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than thinner solar cells made with compounds such as copper-indium-gallium-selenide or cadmium-telluride.
Finding suitable surface areas to plant the solar cells is another design goal. The wings and tail are typically where the solar cells go. But cells can stick to the underside of the aircraft, too, in order to capture reflected light that is often available when the drone flies over a desert or snow, Norris said. He declined to disclose where Alta’s cells are on the prototype Puma or how much electricity they could produce, citing the secretive nature of engineering drones with military use in mind.
“It all comes down to how much power they need, the flight characteristics relative to the sun, and how much the customers are willing to pay,” Norris said.
Military isn’t the only potential customer. There is a growing interest in using drones in agriculture, where the aircrafts could survey the crops and help farmers decide how much and where to administer pesticide, for example. Electric utilities also are interested in using drones to monitor the health of their transmission lines, particularly those located in remote areas, and to determine the extent of damage after a storm.
