carstene - Slashdot User

Submission + - UAV hoisted tower powered by laser over fiberoptic (techbriefs.com)

Submitted by carstene on Thursday June 30, 2011 @12:55PM

carstene writes: LaserMotive, winners of the 2009 NASA power beaming contest, has a new invention , a virtual comm or surveillance tower. It's a quadcotper that can run indefinitely, powered by laser beam over a fiber optic cable. This allows the "tower" to reach great heights and avoids most laser safety issues.

Submission + - NASA Power Beaming challenge is on for November 2

Submitted by carstene on Friday October 23, 2009 @12:58PM

carstene writes: The NASA Centennial Challenge Powered Beaming competition, to develop technology for uses such as a space elevator, or to power a rover in a shadowed creator on the moon, was delayed indefinitely due to trouble setting up the kilometer high race track. It has now had the kinks worked out and is rescheduled for the week of November 2nd. The competition involves using a high power laser to beam power to a robot that climbs a kilometer high cable attached to a helicopter. You can follow the competition at the organizers blog. I'm a member of Lasermotive team, one of the 3 competing. The competition was previously covered on slashdot.

Submission + - $2 million NASA Power Beaming Challenge heating up (spaceelevatorgames.org)

Submitted by

carstene

on Thursday July 23, 2009 @04:15PM

carstene writes: "Qualification rounds for the NASA Centennial Challenge Power beaming contest are underway at the Dryden Flight Research Center . The contest uses a scale model of a space elevator as a race track. Entrants must build a robot to climb a cable, suspended by helicopter, 1 km into the sky without any on board energy storage. The teams are using high power laser beams to transmit power from ground stations to photovoltaic arrays on the robots. If a team can accomplish this at 5 meters per second average speed then they could win up to 2 million dollars. One day this technology could be used to power rovers in shadowed areas of the moon or to recharge electric UAV's in-flight or even a space elevator in the far future. A blog of the event can be found here. Full disclosure, I'm a member of the LaserMotive team that you can follow here on twitter or blog here. "

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