GET Enables In-air Charging of Battery-powered Drones

Imagine an electric-powered drone that never needs to land. That’s the future envisioned by Global Energy Transmission (GET) and on display this week at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) convention in Chicago. 

GET is based on patented technology developed by Russian brothers Leonid and Sergey Plekhanov, graduates of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). Using this technology, a battery-operated drone can recharge while flying over a 40-foot diameter spherical “cloud” of Litz wire in six minutes and then go on to fly for 40 more minutes and then repeat the process endlessly, limited only by the occasional maintenance required on the drone’s motors. Litz wire carries alternating current at radio frequencies and is designed to reduce surface and proximity effect losses.

Power from the cloud can come from any fixed or portable source, including wind, solar, generator, and power line. “This is the world’s first electromagnetic flight. We are essentially levitating 30 to 50 pounds and can fly within the cloud or cloud-to-cloud until you need to maintain the vehicle,” said GET U.S. manager William Kallman. 

Kallman said the technology can be scaled to service vehicles requiring as much as 200 kilowatts of power, roughly what would be needed for an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) urban air taxi such as that proposed by Uber Elevate. He said that power transfer from wire to vehicle is 80 percent efficient and has been tested to seven kilowatts to date over the course of hundreds of hours of test flights.

The company received an experimental license for a data channel from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to demonstrate the technology in December and has also applied for regulatory approval in Switzerland, where it has plans to build recharging clouds above existing rail lines. Kallman said the system is quiet and causes no interference with other devices. “It is non-ionizing, low frequency, and safe. The cloud’s field density is below World Health Organization limits and you can live in it 24/7.” 

GET’s current business model is to operate much like a utility, with development partners. A vehicle would fly to the power cloud, register over the data channel, download power, and pay a premium kilowatt rate. Initial customers will be offered GET equipment on a trial rental basis with a one-time set-up charge. Kallman said virtually any commercially-manufactured drone can be modified to use the system with a pick-up wire and a rapid-charging battery system.