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This poor drone can never leave its box

This poor drone can never leave its box

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Wouldn’t it be nice to not need batteries to power our gadgets? Like if our drones could fly without us needing to plug them into the wall for some juice? One researcher at the Imperial College London is working on that goal. Dr. Samer Aldhaher designed a battery-less drone that can hover through wireless power. It can only float five inches above its power base, but still, no battery.

Aldaher wrote a paper about how he got this drone in the air. The tl;dr version is that it took a lot of custom hardware, and I’m guessing you can’t recreate it at home. The takeaway? Magnetic induction.