Wireless Charging System for Autonomous Drones

Abstract

The objective of this project is to develop a merged photovoltaic wireless charging platform that can be used for autonomous charging of drones. As drones usually have short flight times, these platforms can increase the range and scalability of drone applications. Over the summer, I along with two other Princeton undergraduates (Abdulghafar Al Tair and Alex Ju) used current existing technologies and combined them together as a proof of concept for the wireless charging platform. A drone was built and automated such that it can fly and land autonomously on the charging station. The charging system produced a maximum output power of 12 watts with an efficiency of less than 50%. It took approximately 3+ hours to fully charge a 3S LiPo drone battery wirelessly. In this work, a 28 watt series resonant wireless power transfer system was built. The WPT can successfully charge the same drone battery in less than 1.5 hours with a peak efficiency of 64.15%.