Some amazing engineer built a drone that can lift its own weight using only the electric power that it gets from an on-board solar panel and nothing else (no battery).
Video: I Built a Solar Powered Drone and it WORKS by Luke Maximo Bell
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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I honestly fail to see how this is surprising? Why shouldn't a drone be able to that? (Genuinely asking)
Because solar panels powerful enough to run a drone are large and heavy, and/or fragile. A solar panel sufficiently lightweight to be lifted by a low power drone, and simultaneously powerful enough to supply that drone, isn't easy
Ah, so the tricky thing is to find the balance between weight of the drone and the weight of the solar panel and its capacity, yes? I thought it sounded like "wow, look what solar power can do", as if the actual source of the energy made any difference :)
Yeah the problem is more with the weight of the components and how little energy is in that small patch of sunlight. To provide enough thrust to hold it up is impressive, not just that a solar panel is providing power.
the thing is that the amount of power on that little patch of area is actually a lot; we just continue to underestimate it because it doesn't feel like much. i mean, we stand under direct sunlight all day long and never feel like a train hits us. however, the amount of energy in the sunlight is quite a lot, we're just very good at ignoring it.
because people seem to think that you need to have big areas to generate meaningful amounts of energy. this proves that's not the case.