A contactless charging platform for swarm robots

Direct plugin types of battery charging methods are commonly used for powering mobile objects like swarm robots. With a large number of robots that need to be charged frequently, direct plugging in or manual changing of batteries can be very labor intensive and tedious. A simpler, human intervention free contactless charging method would be ideal for this type of applications. A home charging platform based on Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) is proposed and successfully implemented in this research. The paper covers system design of a power converter for high frequency magnetic field generation, magnetic coupling between a PCB charging base and a power pick-up onboard the robot, as well as the battery charging circuitry. Experimental results show that charging multiple robots simultaneously with a charging to working ratio less than one is achievable.