New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time

Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by jjcm on Monday September 17, 2018 @12:08AM (#18003142)

I feel like this is more advertising than actual innovation. They claim that the battery packs form part of the structural frame, but based on the images on the site [0] it looks like they're just loose batteries inserted everywhere. The lithium batteries themselves aren't providing any structural integrity by the appearance of the drone, and I suspect that they end up using more surface area that has to be structural to encase them than if they just had one giant brick in the center with carbon fiber arms.

I'm playing armchair scientist here, but I think the advertising and marketing are better than the actual breakthroughs.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/usZuqFG.png

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Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by Lerc on Monday September 17, 2018 @01:38AM (#18003475)

The argument that making batteries structural massively contributes to the flight time doesn't seem to be particularly valid anyway. The structural component is likely a tiny proportion of the overall weight. Battery and motors would surely account for the greater part.

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Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by asteli on Monday September 17, 2018 @12:26AM (#18003202)

That's also terrible from a vehicle agility/stability perspective -- generally you want to centralize mass as much as possible to reduce moment of inertia. Additionally cylindrical cells waste mass on metal casings -- li-poly pouch cells are a better use of mass.

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Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by noobiemcfoob on Monday September 17, 2018 @01:23AM (#18003421)

Would you not accept 10x terrible handling for 3x longer flight times?

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Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by dexen on Monday September 17, 2018 @05:13AM (#18004283)

Quad-/Multi-rotors use tilting [1] for steering - including speeding up and slowing, and maintaining / recovering stability. Increased moment of inertia surely increases energy budget necessary for stability and maneuvers, which means lowered energy for flight.

Of course if the weight saving is good enough to offset that, it may still be better off with structural batteries. And the energy budget increase can be calculated pretty well.

[1] achieved by differential thrust, achieved by speeding up / slowing down opposing engines

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Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by ALittleLight on Monday September 17, 2018 @02:49AM (#18003725)

Depends on the purpose of the mission. Flying for fun or to deliver packages agility is probably more important. Flying for surveillance perhaps it would be better to be in the air longer.

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Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by heavenlyblue on Tuesday September 18, 2018 @06:41AM (#18014065)

To be fair, what's going to happen to the drone shipping industry is probably the same thing that happened to the naval shipping industry: we will converge somewhere at local minima between super-fast and super-cheap shipping times.

So I could see how fitting the batteries everywhere in the drone might just work. But at the same time I don't see why no one is yet shaping the batteries for the frame itself.

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Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by Faaak on Monday September 17, 2018 @09:18AM (#18005631)

Tesla thinks otherwise with their new batteries used on model 3 though

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Re:New Electric Drone Has Groundbreaking Flight Time by stetrain on Monday September 17, 2018 @09:51AM (#18005896)

They probably aren't optimizaing for mass as much as you would on a flying drone.

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