Boeing Introduces Remote Charging Stations

Suppose you are tasked with inspection and maintenance of a pipeline. Sure, you can send out a team of engineers with camping gear to march up and down the pipeline, looking for rust and leaks. Or, you could have one drone flying back and forth doing the same job. The latter sounds like an impossible task, given that a drone’s battery lasts between 15 and 20 minutes.

“Not on my watch”, said Boeing’s Spanish branch. This patent application provides for remote charging stations that look like chessboards: each square is adjacent to an oppositely-poled tile, and your quadcopter has conductive feet. So, when the battery is running low, the quad finds the chessboard, and no matter how it lands, one foot will be on a positive tile and one foot on the negative tile. Charging can be through induction or any other way to close the circuit.

The charging station can be powered by solar energy, a generator or hard-wired into a grid. Here is part of the patent application’s description: “The aircraft may not need to be positioned in a particular way to ensure coincidence of its terminals to the correctly-connected conductive tiles. Instead, appropriate conductive tiles may be connected to the electrical power supply to correspond to the position with which the aircraft is resting on the parking surface. The recharging station may further include a controller configured to determine the position (e.g., linear and/or angular position) of the aircraft on the parking surface to allow recharging of the aircraft by the electrical power supply. The controller may be a suitably-programmed computer or an application-specific integrated circuit, hardware such as an electronic circuit configured to operate in the required manner, or any other well-known equivalent.”

Claim 1 seems balanced between vague and precise scope:

“An aircraft recharging station comprising:

• a parking surface disposed for an aircraft provided with a battery to rest thereon, the battery being rechargeable, and the parking surface comprising conductive tiles;
• a switching circuit configured to allow selectively an electrical connection between an electrical power supply and any two of the conductive tiles;

• and a controller configured to determine a position of the aircraft on the parking surface to allow recharging of the battery by the electrical power supply, including the controller being configured to control the switching circuit to iteratively connect a different pair of the conductive tiles to the electrical power supply to provide a circuit including a positive tile and a negative tile connected to the electrical power supply, and test an electrical circuit condition of the circuit connected to the electrical power supply, until a closed circuit condition is determined, thereby indicating that the aircraft is positioned on the positive tile and the negative tile, and that the battery is thereby rechargeable by the electrical power supply.”

Title: “RECHARGING AN AIRCRAFT BATTERY”

US Patent Application Publication No: 20150097530

Filed (Europe): October 3, 2013

Published: April 9, 2015