Abstract
A near-field wireless power transfer (WPT) technology is applied to recharge the battery of a small size drone. The WPT technology is an extremely attractive solution to build an autonomous base station where the drone can land to wirelessly charge the battery without any human intervention. The innovative WPT design is based on the use of a mechanical part of the drone, i.e., landing gear, as a portion of the electrical circuit, i.e., onboard secondary coil. To this aim, the landing gear is made with an adequately shaped aluminum pipe that, after suitable modifications, performs both structural and electrical functions. The proposed innovative solution has a very small impact on the drone aerodynamics and the additional weight onboard the drone is very limited. Once the design of the secondary coil has been defined, the configuration of the WPT primary coil mounted in a ground base station is optimized to get a good electrical performance, i.e., high values of transferred power and efficiency. The WPT design guidelines of primary and secondary coils are given. Finally, a demonstrator of the WPT system for a lightweight drone is designed, built, and tested.
Highlights
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is becoming more and more popular in various areas of application, such as surveillance, monitoring, and couriers [1,2]
This can be done by using the inductive near-field wireless power transfer (WPT) technology that allows a very efficient and reliable power transmission between the ground base station and the drone [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
N1 = 10 could lead to of a slight improvement performance, and to awith significant conclusion, the geometry the primary coil can of bethe optimized for a specific drone a fixed can be used for different landing gears, but, obviously, the optimization can be carried out only increase of the coil weight and complexity
Summary
The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is becoming more and more popular in various areas of application, such as surveillance, monitoring, and couriers [1,2]. The main interest is in autonomous battery recharge without using complex mechanical elements or any human intervention This can be done by using the inductive near-field wireless power transfer (WPT) technology that allows a very efficient and reliable power transmission between the ground base station and the drone [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The application of this technology to drone battery charging must take into account several aspects, mainly related to the additional weight onboard the drone, that must be limited as much as possible. The obtained simulation results are validated by measurements in a WPT system demonstrator mounted in a commercial lightweight drone
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