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well, hello everyone.
Thank you so much for all being here.
I really didn't expect this turnout at what Sunday morning, so yeah, thanks.
We are Benny and Mark and we are developing affordable airborne wind energy systems
So I already explained what actually that is in just a minute, but first let me start with our problem that we have.
So the demand for renewable electricity is rising faster than we all know, but so far the expansion of the electricity production in renewable area is actually very incomplete.
Because solar power has become so cheap and simple that everyone can now produce electricity, so does that mean that our problems are solved?
Well, no, because what happens if the sun doesn't shine.
And because as cheap as producing solar power is as expensive it is actually to store it so far, so that is why we need wind power.
Unfortunately, wind power is very much lagging behind at least where we are from in Germany.
Wind turbines are, if you think about it, the opposite of solar because they are, they need to reach high enough to reach the wind and so they need to be, yeah, as large as possible and that makes them resource intensive, expensive and that requires lengthy planning and also last but not least they are not universally.
Loved for the appearance. So what if it was possible to make wind power as accessible as solar power?
Everyone wind energy promises exactly that as it replaces the concrete tower structure and the foundations with a simple line.
And we actually know this principle from steel robot kites.
When it flies and figure aids or circles, you are pulled by the kite and everyone wind energy systems harvest this energy by replacing your hands with a spool, which is attached to a generator.
Reaching higher where the winds are stronger, maybe even twice as strong as most wind turbines can reach nowadays is as simple as just buying a longer line.
But making this simple concept work is actually not very easy.
So far projects were way too complicated and thus expensive, like this project from Google, which is for that exact same reason that now.
Let's get projects when investments start flowing in, set the industry back with all the advancement lusts.
So, well, let's make this simpler, right?
We realized for that we need to take a lean and open approach.
We start small instead of big and what we can't handle and we make our advancements open.
That secures them and allows participation.
Five years ago, we started from scratch seeking to do as much as we can ourselves and based on open source technology, which is already there and doesn't cost anything.
So, after many iterations and many flight tests, we can autonomously take off, generate power and land.
And our system ended up with basically 10 times lower production costs than other projects and we achieved that through the lowest complexity by far.
For example, we can take off vertically with only two propellers, we can land without propellers.
Our ground station is exceptionally simple as you can see there.
Additionally, our autopilot is also very simple and easy to understand and modify for the user as well.
And it doesn't need any GPS to know where it is.
And we also have very high safety standards, based from the concept of self actually.
And we are for that reason compatible with at traffic.
For example, we can implement at traffic surveillance.
And we have the fastest landing by far so we can avoid obstacles.
We have redundant control surfaces and we have a feature for an autonomous emergency detection and landing.
Also, that's the most important part maybe is the highest flexibility of such a system because it is portable.
It can be deployed in minutes and the flying area can still be used for any other purpose at any time basically.
And of course for us here, the most important aspect is we don't secure ourselves any patterns and all electronics and software are open source.
So, but how much power can we actually make with this?
So, what you see here, this kite generates 1 kilowatt on average and 5 kilowatt peak.
And that means the entire energy consumption of one German person including heating and driving.
And if we enlarge the wingspan to 6 meters, we already get 5 kilowatt average and 25 kilowatt peak.
And that equals the entire energy consumption of an average German farm.
However, this enlargement would not make the production of this system very much more expensive for us.
Hopefully, this would be quite sensible to do, which is why we're going to do that.
And so, as you can see, the wingspan doubles, the output multiplies by 5.
That's important to know.
Yeah.
Right.
Okay, let's have a look at this thing actually flying.
Here you can see it land autonomously.
Here you can see it take off by using its propellers.
The propellers, the software is quite similar to quadcopter stabilization.
Yeah. So, once the altitude is reached, the propellers will automatically just fall in when the power is taken off.
And it can fly efficiently.
And after that, we will not use the propellers anymore.
Here you can see it fly for grades.
While it does this, it reels out the line.
And the ground station acts like a rowing machine.
When you put out the line, it generates electricity.
And as the kite can also fly like a normal airplane.
It can fly back against the wind.
And the ground station only has to reel in the other line.
Okay, let's have a look at the open source hardware and software of this thing.
Here you can see the heart of our system.
It's a custom made PCB, including the fly controller.
We have a bigger picture here.
This is just a common ESP32 micro controller.
Very easy to program.
The rest is very simple to quadcopter drones.
It uses the same sensors.
A gyroscope, a very standard gyroscope.
And for the height, it has two centimeters.
And on the right side, you see the power electronics for driving this.
What is new addition is what's in a circle here.
Pressure sensors are also integrated there, so we can more precisely measure the altitude.
That's what's actually in the line angle sensor.
Here you can see the integrated line angle sensor.
We use the gyroscope sensor as the line angle sensor.
Because it has a gyroscope, an accelerometer, and a magnetometer included.
We don't need the magnetometer, but because the kite doesn't care when we're north and south is.
The wind can blow from any direction, so we have a magnetometer for free.
And what we did is attach a small magnet to the line.
And with a magnetometer, we can sense where the line goes.
This way the kite is able to follow the line when landing.
And also, why flying figure aids?
It knows where the line goes.
So it has the angle of the line.
We know the length of the line by counting it on the ground station.
And so we know exactly where the kite is, basically, without relying on GPS.
We just thought essentially why would we actually control this with GPS like basically any other projects.
Because there's all the parameters already defined.
It doesn't move freely through the air.
Because everything happens in relation to the line.
And the line is where we want to generate power.
So why not use that, right?
So what you can see here is our setup for the ground station, which is equally interesting, I think.
Yes, the ground station is based completely on the VEC motor controller.
And open source hardware and software motor controller by Benjamin Fedder from Sweden.
He spent 10 years developing this thing.
It's absolutely wonderful and awesome.
Some people have replaced their motor controllers in electric vehicles,
but this one and got something I 50% performance increase.
And it's programmable in LISP, which is absolutely awesome.
For our purposes, we need to define the line tension based on how fast the line is really out.
And this is just one line in LISP code.
It's just so easy to program this motor controller.
It has also some other advantages like we don't need any additional sensors to count the rotations of the motors.
It just senses all by itself the exact position of the motor.
It's absolutely wonderful thing to have.
And we're really grateful for the open source.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah.
To the left as well, another custom design PCB was integrated.
Yeah, this is because we need to send.
So the VSE counts the motor revolutions and thus knows the line length.
And then we send the line length using using another SB32 on the ground station.
We send the line length to the kite.
So what can we do with this?
Well, first of all, we can with this setup, we can catch the kite autonomously.
We can take off again.
So as you can see, it's not perfect yet, but.
Okay.
Is it okay?
Yes.
As you can see, it will be just catch by this very simple setup.
And it can take off again, as I said, it's not perfect yet, but we testing it currently.
Yeah.
So we also was a friend from the US.
We also developed a soft kite variant.
So with the soft kite, this will be less autonomous, but as you need probably need to throw it up yourself.
But this positive great potential, for example, like free time use.
And it's going to be much simpler and even more accessible.
And to use this exactly the same drone station as we used.
We told them how to build it and to build it in Montana and the USA.
It's all just ever meeting.
And here you can see him operating this at the Burning Man Festival.
So our ground station is already very proven in hard conditions I would say.
And here you can see basically the features which our kite has for testing as well as operations.
For example, we can edit all the and adjust all the constants of the auto pilot, all the settings.
We can adjust live in flight on our phone or tablet or whatever.
And we can demonstrate this here as well.
And in that feature you can see on the bottom right, which will be more important in the future.