MUMBAI, India, Sept. 14 -- Intellectual Property India has published a patent application (202641105000 A) filed by A. Sathish Kumar; Dr. P. Gowtham; Dr. Senthilnathan S; and Dr R T Sarathbabu on September 01, 2026, for Adaptive In-Flight Battery Relay System For Extended Endurance Autonomous Multirotor Drone Swarms.
Inventors include A. Sathish Kumar; Dr. P. Gowtham; Dr. Senthilnathan S; and Dr R T Sarathbabu.
The application for the patent was published on September 11, 2026, under issue no. 37/2026.
Abstract: Flight endurance remains the dominant constraint limiting the practical deployment of autonomous multirotor drones in persistent tasks such as infrastructure inspection, perimeter surveillance, and precision agriculture. An adaptive in-flight battery relay system is disclosed, in which a fleet of lightweight autonomous carrier drones delivers charged modular battery cells to a continuously operating working drone through an in-flight docking and hot-swap procedure, so that the working drone need never land during a mission. The system comprises three cooperating elements: a self aligning electro-permanent magnetic quick-connect coupling with a conical probe-and-funnel geometry that tolerates residual lateral misalignment; a predictive dispatch scheduler at a ground station that estimates a time-to-depletion for the working drone and launches a charged carrier ahead of that deadline; and a downwash-aware relative-position stabilization controller that models the aerodynamic coupling between two closely spaced multirotors and holds the relative offset inside a narrow capture window during contact. A modular dual-cell power path allows one battery cell to be replaced while a second continues to supply power, so that propulsion is never interrupted. By delivering energy to the working drone where and while it operates, the invention converts flight endurance from a hard per-flight limit into a logistics parameter that scales with the number of carrier drones.
Disclaimer: Curated by HT Syndication.
