This week at IVO was one the team will never forget. It was a week of historical importance not just for our technology, but also the engineering community. The event that took place March 23rd, 2020 at IVO East was a confirmation that Nikola Tesla’s dream of a wirelessly powered world is real and is approaching quickly. To understand the gravity of the events that took place, we have to start February 3rd of this year.
To begin, we had to start with a simple baseline. We needed a drone that had minimal mission capability and minimal flight time. The reason we wanted such a drone was to prove that we could make the most mediocre drone outperform drones with the most advanced battery technology on board. We worked with Edgar Munoz of Aeronyde, a commercial drone service provider, to select the perfect drone for the task. The drone we selected had a maximum sustained flight time of just 5 minutes. In our testing it was able to achieve 4 minutes 47 seconds maximum on battery power. We reconfigured our test bench and set the stage for the CBAT enabled drone. CBAT didn’t disappoint.
March 23rd, 2020 our team fired up the drone without a battery on board. CBAT was wirelessly powering the drone. At the 5 minute mark the drone remained at full load. At the 10 minute mark CBAT officially increased the drones flight time by 100%. At the 35 minute mark the drone sustained flight longer then any electric drone on the market. At the 50 minute mark we began to approach the limitations of our GoPro battery that was filming the testing. At 1 hour 20 minutes and 8 seconds our GoPro battery died. The drone remained airborne at full load. A drone initially intended to fly for 5 minutes flew longer then any electric drone on the market and could sustain flight indefinitely without the need for a battery.
Stay tuned, this is just the beginning.