Abstract
A wireless charging pad for drones based on resonant magnetic technology to recharge the internal battery is presented. The goal of the study was to design a robust, reliable and efficient charging station where a drone can land to automatically recharge its battery. The components of the wireless power transfer (WPT) system on board the drone must be compact and light in order not to alter the payload of the drone. In this study, the non-planar receiving coil of the WPT system is integrated into the drone’s landing gear while the transmitting pad is designed to be efficient for any landing point and orientation of the drone in the charging pad area. To meet these requirements, power transmission is accomplished by an array of planar coils integrated into the ground base station. The configuration of the WPT coil system, including a three-dimensional receiving coil and a multicoil transmitter, is deeply analyzed to evaluate the performance of the WPT, considering potential lateral misalignment and rotation of the receiving coil due to imprecise drone landing. According to the proposed configuration, the battery of a light drone (2 kg in weight and 0.5 kg in payload) is recharged in less than an hour, with an efficiency always greater than 75%.
Highlights
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular in various fields, including surveillance, delivering and monitoring [1]
A possible solution to achieve this goal consists in designing a ground base station where the drone lands for automatically recharging its batteries by using near field wireless power transfer (WPT) technology
This technology, which is widely used currently in several applications, allows a very efficient and reliable power transmission between the ground base station, which hosts a transmitting coil, and the drone equipped with a receiving coil installed on board the drone [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Summary
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly popular in various fields, including surveillance, delivering and monitoring [1]. A possible solution to achieve this goal consists in designing a ground base station (landing pad) where the drone lands for automatically recharging its batteries by using near field (inductive) wireless power transfer (WPT) technology This technology, which is widely used currently in several applications, allows a very efficient and reliable power transmission between the ground base station, which hosts a transmitting coil, and the drone equipped with a receiving coil installed on board the drone [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Full integration in the landing gear of the receiving coil, meaning that no extra weight and no reduction in payloads occur; High tolerance of misalignment conditions through the adoption of an array of planar transmitting coils in the ground base station; High charging power and good electrical efficiency for every possible drone landing position and orientation in the ground base station. The solution proposed in this paper combines the benefits provided by the enhanced landing gear, which acts as a WPT receiver [17], with the simplicity of a smart multicoil landing pad, where, depending on the drone’s landing position, only one coil of the transmitting array is active during the charging process
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