Battery swapping and wireless charging for a home robot system with remote human assistance

This paper presents a battery swapping and wireless charging robot system. A six degree-of-freedom manipulator mounted on a four-wheeled robot base is used to grasp the dead battery in the robot and plug it into a charger on a wireless charging station for recharging. A camera mounted on the robot provides visual information to help the user control the robot remotely through any user terminals with Internet connections. The robot sends visual information to a home server through a Wi-Fi network. The server transmits visual information to the user through the Internet. The user can control the robot to move to the position near the charging station and swap the dead battery with a charged one. A prototype system has been implemented and some performance tests have been done. Experimental results show that the peak current of wireless charging of the system is about 725 mA. The charging time for a 4000 mAh battery is about 8 hours with the average charging efficiency of 46.4%. The video data transmitting speed through the Wi-Fi network is about 14 frames per second. The robot can swap its battery in about 62 s with human assistance.