31–40 of 149 posts
> Removing battery swaps is the last step to deploy UAVs autonomously at scale. I can't say, as a citizen, that I'm particularly excited about this. > Autonomous drones can deliver over 20x the inspection coverage for the same cost. And we have 20x the manpower to review this footage? I wonder if you're just generating a bunch of data that cannot be practically used. "More coverage" isn't always the best answer. "Bet…
> Removing battery swaps is the last step to deploy UAVs autonomously at scale. I can't say, as a citizen, that I'm particularly excited about this. > Autonomous drones can deliver over 20x the inspection coverage for the same cost. And we have 20x the manpower to review this footage? I wonder if you're just generating a bunch of data that cannot be practically used. "More coverage" isn't always the best answer. "Bet…
> Removing battery swaps is the last step to deploy UAVs autonomously at scale. I can't say, as a citizen, that I'm particularly excited about this. > Autonomous drones can deliver over 20x the inspection coverage for the same cost. And we have 20x the manpower to review this footage? I wonder if you're just generating a bunch of data that cannot be practically used. "More coverage" isn't always the best answer. "Bet…
And in most cases of inspection, you need to look at the stuff anyway, so any cost reduction is very welcome. And if you do increase the total coverage volume while reducing human time, you get a double benefit of being able to provide more granular information, either in time or in space, which can often be useful.
(And as a commenter below notes - this all works pretty well with several year old CNNs. We use a limited amount of image-LLM stuff to surface things zero-shot, but a lot of what we end up doing is a very conventional classifier with a lot of engineering work to make it very fast for the experts to see only the important things.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was my thought as well...I suppose there may be something I am not thinking of. Perhaps they get more total energy if they "perch" on the tower.
It'll definitely charge faster, if only because it's drawing less power to stay up and getting closer. The only question is, is it like 10% or 100% faster?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd assume otherwise you have to have a way for the drones to meter their usage and pay the power company. It will likely make power theft easier, but it seems entirely viable to have an account with the power company where you report "I drew X joules from line Y" and for them to bill appropriately.
That seems entirely unviable to me. Have you met… people? “Trust me, bro!” is something I wish my power company would do, but they installed a meter instead.
Almost every US utility has a "UM" process to self-assess an unmetered load's consumption and be billed. So, yes, it's not only viable but widespread.
Can someone please tell how? Touching a power cable is not a closed circuit
This will open a giant can of worms. Hobbyists, bad actors and military will be taking advantage.