Lamppost Without the Post

While I was writing about the “lamppost solution” using a Mavic 2 in the previous article, the crew of Volarious actually decided to test that solution out to see whether the idea is viable.

We chose one night that was least likely to rain to bring the V-Line out. However, we couldn’t just fly right away as the sky wasn’t dark completely. We just waited it out by doing other demo projects with another drone. I took my time coming back and forth from the office to the field for the cameras and other backup gears. At about 8 pm, it was finally as dark as pitch. We leisurely set up the tethered station and the drone within seconds, despite not having much lighting. 

Time to take off!

For this test, our lamppost was a spotlight attached to an M2E minus … the post. The light was intensely bright, but we need to see whether it would be as bright after the drone was flying at about 20 meters.

We took a couple of minutes of hovering to take some initial stage photo shots, then we let the drone climb. The result was surprisingly astounding. It was as if we were filming a UFO illuminating its enigmatic light down to earth, a second moon with its luminous white glow, or just a portable lamppost without … the post!

We let the tethered mavic “lamppost” to do its job for as long as we could. If only we brought enough batteries or a power supply, we would have left it there until morning!

Perhaps in the future, we wouldn’t need to build motionless streetlights, but we can have tethered “lampposts” flying around the area like those we’ve seen in science fiction.