Different Solutions for Dynamic Wireless Power Transfer to Indoor Autonomous Mobile Robots Moving along Arbitrary Path

Abstract

With the rapid development of automatics, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) have become integral parts of almost all warehouses. In order to reduce size of batteries used in AMR or even eliminate them completely, dynamic wireless power transfer (WPT) has become of great interest recently. Much research has been done in the field of dynamic WPT for automated guided vehicles (AGV) moving along single fixed (previously known) path, such as straight line. In contrary to AGV, AMR move along optimum path which is dependent on different conditions. This means that dynamic WPT which is used for AGV is unsuitable for AMR, because AMR path is not fixed (it can be arbitrary). Therefore, different solutions of dynamic WPT systems for AMRs when they move along arbitrary path to quickly transport goods to the final destination avoiding collisions with other objects are proposed and discussed in the paper. The main attention is paid on developing dynamic capacitive WPT system based on proposed effective solutions and advanced control. The best solution for dynamic WPT to AMRs is chosen.