For anyone that has experience with various types of fliers like this, why does battery life suck so much and are there any options that can be used to extend it very significantly? Is it a matter of needing to invent better batteries, would reducing weight be the best option, or does it need to run off of some different fuel source to improve?
I guess my question really is: will this improve over time, or is there some real stumbling block that's holding that back?
The power/weight ratio. Particularly the energy density of available batteries. Unless batteries can be given a much greater stored energy capacity per unit weight, "toy" flight will be the only kind of battery powered flight possible.
In the FPV community it's not uncommon to get +1 hour flying times. But the planes are of course bigger than the dragonfly. The battery types used is Lithium polymer battery. Some people add solar cells on their plane to extend their flying times. This guy uses a combination of a glider and solar cells to fly for +5 hours http://fpvlab.com/forums/showthread.php?8311-New-round-trip-...
There hasn't been much improvement in battery energy density over the past 10 years. There are some interesting developments going on promising 3x-30x improvement on li-ion, but none of it has emerged yet.
When someone finally cracks this, it will have disruptive effects on mobile computing to electric cars to renewable energy storage and a million other fields.
Hobby grade remote control helicopters get around 7-10 minutes of flight time (without 3d acrobatics), and quads can easily get 20~ minutes without adding any additional batteries. They usually don't come with as complicated electronics as the video suggests.
Hovering Time: 8-10 minutes
Hybrid Flight Time: 25-30 minutes
Image source: http://d2oadd98wnjs7n.cloudfront.net/medias/521391/pictures/...