Landmines Of The Future Could Be Recharged Remotely By Drones

Kelsey D. Atherton
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Remote sensors exist where it is tedious, dangerous, or difficult for humans to regularly reach them. Those same characteristics make maintenance difficult, by design, and tax already-strained batteries to the edges of their lifespan. What if, instead of sending humans to maintain remote sensors, drones could fly close by and then, through radio waves, remotely recharge those same remote sensors?

With such a system, sensors placed in far flung corners of everything from crop fields to battlefields could be maintained by regular contactless charging from visiting drones.

“In the proposed approach, a UAV transmits radio frequencies to each sensor, which has an antenna for detecting the signals,” according to a summary in IEEE Spectrum of a recent study. “The signals are then conveyed to a rectifier, which converts the signals into electricity. This power can be used to charge the sensor and/or activate it.”

The study was published in March and conducted by researchers at the American University of Beirut and the Institute of Electronics, Computer, and Telecommunications Engineering in Italy.

Drones had to be within 90 feet to activate the sensors, and within 4 feet to charge them. That ranges comes with some hard limitations; even if the sensor is difficult for humans to reach, it still has to have a close enough flight path for the robot to count.

But it also comes with some serious advantages. Drones mounted at charging stations connected to reliable sources of power could repeatedly maintain whole swaths of sensors, flying autonomously to tend, say, crop-monitoring beacons in much the same way farmers tend crops.

And when it comes to scattering sensors over a military environment, drones could circulate to see if, say, the acoustic sensors in a mountain pass are still working as designed, and could get close to give them more juice if needed.

One of the more distant and novel military applications would be in static defenses. Part of the Trump administration’s push to develop new landmines hinges on the Pentagon’s understanding that all the remotely triggered explosives it places in the ground can be disabled remotely and safely deactivated. This, at least in theory, turns landmines from a danger that can last centuries into a tool that can be placed for a time and then safely recovered. (The US is not a party to the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty).

The possibility of remotely activating sensors, and then remotely recharging those sensors, could power everything from wildlife monitors to agricultural tools to, maybe, a new crop of land mines, served by robots.

In the meantime, enjoy this video of a quadcopter remotely charging a watermark sensor.