Interesting Engineering

Greek drone maker Velos Rotors has launched the V4, its newest electric unmanned helicopter. According to Velos investor George Tziralis, it flies for up to 120 minutes, carries up to 11 kg, and is guaranteed 80 minutes with a 4 kg payload, up from the 68 minutes the Velos V3 logged in April.

Envision has switched on an 800-volt DC power system at its Galaxy AI data center campus in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, and says it is already running live computing workloads. The setup uses solid-state transformers to turn 10 kV grid power straight into 800V DC, with batteries and an AI controller handling sudden GPU power swings.

Finnish boatbuilder Foilone has fitted its single-seat electric hydrofoil, Pegasus, with a bigger motor, a new motor controller and a new throttle pedal during test sessions on Lake Como, Italy. In Foilone's own footage, the boat goes from standstill to foiling in about three seconds, though the extra low-speed torque can make the front foil lose grip on takeoff.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Stuttgart have built Floaty, a 340-gram robot that flies without propellers by soaring on rising air. Four bird-inspired flaps reshape its body to steer, and in wind-tunnel tests it hovered on about 10 watts per kilogram, roughly an order of magnitude less than typical multirotor drones.

South Korean startup Diden Robotics, spun out of KAIST's HUBO Lab, builds the Diden Spider, a quadruped that climbs steel walls on switchable magnetic feet to weld and inspect inside ships. It finds its way by matching 3D scans to the ship's CAD drawings and learned to walk in simulated shipyards before going into the field.

Maximo Robotics, the construction robotics company incubated by AES, says its machines have completed more than 300,000 construction tasks on US utility-scale solar projects. With its new Max 4.0 platform, the company says crews working alongside the robots install at 2.5 times their manual rate, and customers pay for every task completed.

Flywing's X Wing Fighter is a remote-controlled electric VTOL with four X-shaped wings that hovers like a quadcopter and switches to plane mode at the flick of a switch. Pilots fly it through goggles from a miniature head-tracking cockpit over DJI's O4 Air video link, while a LoRa-based "radar" tracks up to six X Wings for formation flying. It lists at $2,499 on Flywing's store and is currently sold out.

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French startup AEMOTION has built a two-seat electric microcar that is just 79 cm wide and tilts beyond 35 degrees in corners, with the rider steering and leaning it through a motorcycle-style handlebar. It reaches 115 km/h, covers up to 200 km on its fixed battery and can be driven in France on a regular car licence plus seven hours of training, with first deliveries expected around 2027.

Lithium-ion is built for hours. Wind can vanish for days. Ore Energy’s iron-air battery uses only iron, water, and air to carry energy across a windless week, and a 1 GWh deal in the Netherlands is already signed. https://bit.ly/3WCoZzl