Welcome to the future.
This week at IVO is one our team will never forget. It marked a moment of historic importance—not only for our technology, but for the engineering community as a whole. On March 23, 2020, at IVO East, an event took place that confirmed Nikola Tesla’s long-held vision of a wirelessly powered world is not only real, but rapidly approaching.
To understand the significance of what occurred, we must begin earlier—on February 3 of that year.
Our objective was to start with a simple, unimpressive baseline. We selected a drone with minimal mission capability and extremely limited flight time. The intent was deliberate: to prove that even the most modest platform could outperform the world’s most advanced battery-powered drones when enabled by CBAT.
Working with Edgar Munoz of Aeronyde, a commercial drone service provider, we selected a drone with a maximum sustained flight time of just five minutes. In testing, it achieved a best-case battery performance of four minutes and forty-seven seconds.
With the baseline established, we reconfigured the test bench and prepared the CBAT-enabled configuration.
On March 23, 2020, our team powered up the drone—with no battery on board. The aircraft was operating entirely on wireless power delivered by CBAT.
At the five-minute mark, the drone remained at full load. At ten minutes, CBAT had officially doubled the drone’s maximum flight time. At thirty-five minutes, the drone had surpassed the sustained flight duration of every electric drone on the market.
At fifty minutes, we began approaching the limitation—not of the drone, but of the GoPro battery recording the test. At one hour, twenty minutes, and eight seconds, the camera battery failed. The drone remained airborne at full load.
A platform designed for five minutes of flight had exceeded every electric drone on the market—and demonstrated the ability to sustain flight indefinitely without a battery.
Stay tuned. This is just the beginning.
Welcome to the future.