Wireless Power Transfer Near-field Technologies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Review

Abstract

Wireless power transfer (WPT) techniques are being popular currently with the development of midrange wireless powering and charging technology to gradually substitute the need for wired devices duringcharging. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are also being used with many practical purposes for agriculture,surveillance, and healthcare, etc. There is a trade-off between the weight of the UAVs or their batteries andtheir flying time. In order to support those UAVs perform better in their tasks, WPT is applied in UAVs torecharge batteries which help to increase their working time. This paper highlights up-to-date studies that arespecific to near-field WPT deploying into UAVs. The charging distances, the transfer efficiency, and transferpower, etc. are considered to provide an overview of all common problems in using and charging UAVs,especially for autonomous landing and charging. By classification and suggestions in specific problems willbe provided opportunities and challenges with respect to apply near-field WPT techniques for charging thebattery of UAVs and other applications in the real world.

Keywords

• autonomous landing
• capacitive coupling
• inductive coupling
• resonant inductive coupling
• uavs