Blast from the past - Kites for clean energy

I was going through some of my old New Scientist magazines the other day & found an article you all may be interested in.
I tried to link to the website, but you need to subscribe, so I scanned the story.
Seeing the kite brand in the first pic, I'm guessing they wont be putting these in near trees.




On the site is an older story about computers learning to fly kites.

Computers learn to fly kites for renewable energy

* 10:11 08 September 2007

A new way to harness wind energy may take off now that computers have learned to kite surf.

Experienced kite surfers know that on a calm day they can maximise the power they draw from the breeze by flying their aerofoil-shaped kites through the air in a figure of eight.

"The amount of energy you get from the figure of eight is massive, easily 10 times what you get from just parking the kite downwind," says Allister Furey, a roboticist and avid kite surfer at the University of Sussex in the UK.

Researchers have been trying to use high-flying kites tethered to turbines to generate electricity: when the kites tug on the lines this turns the turbine. While the idea works well when the wind blows consistently, the computers controlling the kites run into trouble when there are gusts of wind or lulls, often leading to crashes.

Now Furey and his colleague Inman Harvey have developed a neural network that has learned to steer a kite like a seasoned professional. First they wrote 20 different software algorithms and got each to fly simulated kites so that they would pull as hard as possible in a wind of 8 metres per second.

"At first they were like blindfolded idiots - they would crash the kite in a quarter-second," says Inman. "But one or two would crash it in a half-second."

The algorithms that kept the kites aloft longer were "bred" together and after 200 generations they had not only evolved the ability to fly the kites, but had also developed the figure of eight style. Better still, they could cope with strong gusts and lulls in the wind.