Wireless power and data transfer system for station-based autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) has widely been used for underwater explorations. However, AUV requires frequent launch and recovery processes for power feeding and data extraction. In order to solve these problems, we propose wireless power and data transfer system, which uses a pair of coils and transfer power and signal by using electromagnetic induction. We designed a system that can cover both power and communication signal transferring, and evaluated its performance by experiments. The obtained results suggest that the designed system can support high efficiency power transfer (>80%), high communication quality (with BER of 0.1%), and high data rate (>40kbps). It was confirmed that underwater wireless power and data transfer system can archived using single hardware.