Wireless far-field charging of a micro-UAV

Author

Dunbar, Steven ; Wenzl, Freeman ; Hack, Christopher ; Hafeza, Ronny ; Esfeer, Hasan ; Defay, Francois ; Prothin, Sebastien ; Bajon, Damienne ; Popovic, Zoya

Author_Institution

Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

fYear

2015

fDate

13-15 May 2015

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

4

Abstract

Flight time of micro-UAVs is limited by the battery size they can carry. Typically, they need to land and recharged after about 10 minutes. This paper presents a method for wirelessly charging the UAV battery when it lands, without the need to remove it and replace it. The system consists of a light-weight flexible rectenna array mounted on the UAV body and micro-controller driven power management circuit that enables efficient battery charging. In this work, a frequency of 5.9GHz is chosen as a compromise between size and rectifier efficiency. The UAV battery is charged from the edge of the far field with about 5W of transmit power.

Keywords

antenna arrays; autonomous aerial vehicles; battery powered vehicles; inductive power transmission; microcontrollers; power transmission control; rectennas; rectifiers; secondary cells; UAV battery; UAV body; autonomous aerial vehicles; battery size; flight time; frequency 5.9 GHz; light-weight flexible rectenna array; microUAV; microcontroller driven power management circuit; rectifier efficiency; transmit power; wireless far-field charging; Arrays; Batteries; Integrated circuit modeling; Load modeling; Power generation; Rectennas; Slot antennas; Ceramics; coaxial resonators; delay filters; delay-lines; power amplifiers;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Wireless Power Transfer Conference (WPTC), 2015 IEEE

Conference_Location

Boulder, CO

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/WPT.2015.7140154

Filename

7140154