Below is a video showing the entire twelve and a half hours of laser-powered UAV flight (on a 5-minute battery) demonstrated at the end of October in the Future of Flight Aviation Center, with our partner Ascending Technologies.

Please contact us if you are interested in adding infinite duration wireless power to your UAV!

I want to give huge thanks to Owen Kindig of Ztoryteller not only for making the great video, but for his hard work, dedication, and creativity.

The Space Frontier Foundation is calling for support for the administration’s version of the 2011 NASA budget (and to oppose the House version of the budget). One of the ways they’re advocating is via video collecting interviews from the “NewSpace” community. LaserMotive’s Tom Nugent is one of the individuals included in the video. Check it out!

UPDATE: The Senate version of the NASA authorization bill passed.

LaserMotive is proud to introduce a 5 minute video that tells who we are, what power beaming is and what applications we think it can enhance or enable.

Many thanks to Owen Kindig of Ztoryteller for his awesome work in creating this video.

NASA has put their video summarizing the 2009 Centennial Challenges online. Team LaserMotive is featured prominently in the Power Beaming segment.

Below is a continuous video of LaserMotive’s first climb at the 2009 Power Beaming competition. Because it took nearly 4 minutes, the middle 3 minutes is sped up, and accompanied by appropriate music. We incorporated audio recorded by LaserMotive on the lakebed, so that all the different voices can be heard. Thank you to NASA for providing the video footage!

I really should have made and uploaded this video months ago. It was only the tech symposium at NASA that drove me to make it, and now we can share it with you!

Thanks to Ted over at the Space Elevator Blog, we have a link to Fox News coverage of the power beaming competition, including some great quotes from LaserMotive co-founders Jordin Kare and Tom Nugent.

As we mentioned before, helicopter testing for the power beaming competition went very well last weekend. We had a sacrificial dummy climber (dubbed the “Red Shirt array”) that we clamped onto the cable. There were two cheap cameras mounted on it, one pointing up and the other pointing down, to record the flight.

I’ve combined and synced the two videos. “Vomitrocious” is how some people described them individually. See what you think when they’re combined (but be warned, the spinning might make you a bit dizzy)!

While practicing braking at the 2007 SE Games in Utah, we had an incident where our vehicle (built like a tank) was accidentally allowed to free-fall down our treadmill cable from a height of nearly 4 meters. It survived with no issues (see the video if you’d like to relive that moment of terror for us).

Ben Shelef, organizer of the Power Beaming competition, blogged about stress testing going on at the competition site (Dryden Flight Research Center) this week:

It is always difficult to place your project into a stress test – you poured your heart and soul into it, and all you really want to do is protect it and treat it gently so it doesn’t break… Which is of course silly – you should test your brakes in an empty parking lot, not in the middle of traffic.

As part of our preparation for those tests (which are themselves preparation for the actual competition), we’ve been doing a number of tests, including dropping the vehicle (on purpose, this time) down the cable onto our bottom bumper. We were a bit nervous about it before the test, but this test and many others went pretty well:

As you can see, the structure is very robust, despite being engineered to be lighter than our previous entry. The climber vehicle will undergo other testing at the competition site (Dryden) this week to evaluate its mechanical robustness. We don’t know if the Dryden safety personnel will have any concerns, but this video shows that descending the cable shouldn’t be too much of a safety concern, mechanically speaking. We’ll find out this week if anything else is of concern. While some of our team is at Dryden for those tests, the rest of us are preparing for yet more tests of our own here at our shop.

…It Cooks!

There are always more tests one can do when developing a new system, especially one like ours that is so different from what’s been done before. During one recent test, we ran our lasers at high power to evaluate some of our optics, and as usual we dumped the beam into our foamed carbon beam stops. But why let all that energy go to waste, especially when it’s easy to skip meals while working late? So we decided to grill some hot dogs while running the test. Here’s the result:

Yum! And here is a video of the cooking process. Next time we’ll have to throw an IR filter on the camcorder to reduce the brightness of the laser light.

We still have some spare hot dogs in the fridge, so if we need to do another test like this, we’ll probably cook some more. This time, we just need to remember to bring some condiments…

Last year, there were many items which made interesting sounds, and we joked about making a “Sounds of LaserMotive” CD. One of the obstacles to releasing the cool sounds was that we didn’t take the time to record many of them.

Here’s a minor example of an interesting sound this year. The motors in our tracking mirror make an interesting sound as they move, and when the control computer is powered on, it has a short start-up / calibration sequence for the mirror which moves it and makes a few notes.

If we get the time, maybe we’ll program the mirror to play a song…