Autonomous Wireless Self-Charging for Multi-Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the ability to operate in confined spaces and to hover over point of interest, but they have limited flight time and endurance. Conventional contact-based charging system for UAVs has been used, but it requires high landing accuracy for proper docking. Instead of the conventional system, autonomous wireless battery charging system for UAVs in outdoor conditions is proposed in this paper. UAVs can be wirelessly charged using the proposed charging system, regardless of yaw angle between UAVs and wireless charging pad, which can further reduce their control complexity for autonomous landing. The increased overall mission time eventually relaxes the limitations on payload and flight time. In this paper, a cost effective automatic recharging solution for UAVs in outdoor environments is proposed using wireless power transfer (WPT). This research proposes a global positioning system (GPS) and vision-based closed-loop target detection and a tracking system for precise landing of quadcopters in outdoor environments. The system uses the onboard camera to detect the shape, color and position of the defined target in image frame. Based on the offset of the target from the center of the image frame, control commands are generated to track and maintain the center position. Commercially available AR.Drone. was used to demonstrate the proposed concept which is equppied with bottom camera and GPS. Experiments and analyses showed good performance, and about 75% average WPT efficiency was achieved in this research.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges

“…In [278], the authors use GPS to land the UAV on the charging pad. In [284], the authors corporate the GPS system with camera and image processing system to detect the charging station. The authors in [280] allow for imprecise landing on wide frame landing pad.…”

UAV Payload Transportation via RTDP Based Optimized Velocity Profiles

“…These include losses of motors and electronic speed controllers. Although several studies have focused on improving battery charging methods for multi-rotors such as wireless charging [8,9], still, on average, the flight time of multi-rotors after every charge is around 20 to 30 min [10], which limits the applications of the multi-rotors. Other causes of energy consumption include the autopilot or any companion computer attached to the aerial platform, sensors such as a camera for visual servoing or communication links.…”

Wireless Power Transfer Technology Applied to an Autonomous Electric UAV with a Small Secondary Coil

“…The major issues to recharge drone batteries by WPT systems are described in several past works [14][15][16][17][18][19]. In [14], two circular planar spiral coils have been used for both primary and secondary circuits of a WPT system, the main disadvantages of this configuration are the significant weight and dimension of the on-board components that reduce the payload of the drone.…”

“…In [14], two circular planar spiral coils have been used for both primary and secondary circuits of a WPT system, the main disadvantages of this configuration are the significant weight and dimension of the on-board components that reduce the payload of the drone. In [15], an automatic landing procedure is presented to improve the landing precision reducing the possibility of misalignment condition between the transmitting and the receiving coils. A WPT charging system based on a mobile primary coil was presented in [16].…”