Automatic Battery Swap

[npalen]

viewtopic.php?f=4&t=31398&p=287483#p287483

Here's the carousel that is located inside the landing pad "box". The video shows an arm that pivots up and pulls the depleted battery and then drops it down into a slot in the carousel which then indexes to expose a "new" battery to the arm for loading into the bird.

 

[npalen]

Where did you see the "stock money" you mention? I missed that.

 

[ianwood]

Interesting concept but looks expensive. Not sure how useful it is if the operator is flying it. If it was fully autonomous, that would make sense.

 

[npalen]

I assumed that the battery swap was part of the autonomous mission but that may not be the case. Yeah, I'm sure it is VERY expensive.

 

[SteveMann]

I assumed that the battery swap was part of the autonomous mission but that may not be the case. Yeah, I'm sure it is VERY expensive.

What amazes me is that they can *get* funding. Remind me of the 1990's in Silicon Valley where any idea could raise millions of dollars. Actually, when a legal path exists, I expect to see the same thing all over again.

 

[npalen]

I understand that the landing pad also downloads data during the battery swap and sends to the Cloud.

 

[MonsieurAnon]

To be honest, there's actually applications for this, that are worth that much, and developing it as a deployable product might cost that much or more.

I have a lot of customers who are manually going out there and shooting 3D scans using my camera mounts, and they are the limiting factor. The human is the problem. If you could take a fleet of drones to a location, and scan all the way to the edge of their battery range, with say, just 1 vehicle and 1 operator, you could produce all the level assets for a video game, or animation in a day.

Sure; you'd need banks of servers back at your office to process the data, but do any of you guys have much of a concept how much money AAA game developers spend on environment art?

I'll put it this way; these guys just got funded about that much.

/edit

I hadn't even watched the video and I guessed it was about photogrammetry.