Reach Power and the NIMBUS Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln announced an AFWERX STTR Phase I award on August 4 to study wireless power for perched drones. The application is persistent communications and ISR, meaning a drone that sits on a rooftop or a pole and keeps its sensors running for days instead of minutes.
Why perching is the interesting part
Most wireless power work for drones has chased the harder problem, which is beaming energy to an aircraft that is actively flying. Reach has done that too, using a mesh of four transmitters to charge a UAV in flight.
Perching sidesteps almost all of that difficulty. A stationary receiver means no beam tracking, no doppler correction, and no aerodynamic penalty for carrying a rectenna. The drone lands, sips power, and takes off when it has a reason to. For a surveillance mission where the aircraft is supposed to be watching something rather than moving, that is the correct trade.
It also removes the single biggest operational cost of small drone deployments, which is a human being driving out to swap batteries.
The second award in two months
This lands eight weeks after Reach and Gambit picked up Operational Energy Capability Improvement Fund money for AI-managed drone swarms that never need to land at all. The two programs are attacking the same problem from opposite ends: one keeps the aircraft airborne, the other accepts that it will land and makes landing productive.
Reach also won Army xTechSearch 9 in May and has been running an SBIR out of it. For a company working on a technology that spent a century as a punchline, the procurement pipeline is looking unusually healthy.
The Tesla connection is not decorative
Reach uses radio frequency power transfer, which is precisely the approach Tesla dismissed. He held that radio waves traveled in straight lines and attenuated too fast to carry useful energy, and he backed conduction through the earth instead. He was wrong about the first part in a way that took modern phased arrays and adaptive beamforming to prove.
The company’s own founding story acknowledges this directly. The technology that finally delivered on Tesla’s promise is the one he ruled out.