Set Phasers to Stun: Beaming Power and Control to Mobile Robots with Laser Light
This addresses the challenge of limited battery life and communication constraints for small mobile robots, though it appears to be an incremental improvement over existing wireless power/control methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of powering and controlling mobile robots wirelessly by developing Phaser, a system that uses laser light to deliver power and data simultaneously. Their prototype achieved optical power densities over 110 mW/cm² and error-free communication at multi-meter ranges, enabling battery-free robots to reach nearly 2x higher speeds than prior work while navigating obstacles.
We present Phaser, a flexible system that directs narrow-beam laser light to moving robots for concurrent wireless power delivery and communication. We design a semi-automatic calibration procedure to enable fusion of stereo-vision-based 3D robot tracking with high-power beam steering, and a low-power optical communication scheme that reuses the laser light as a data channel. We fabricate a Phaser prototype using off-the-shelf hardware and evaluate its performance with battery-free autonomous robots. Phaser delivers optical power densities of over 110 mW/cm$^2$ and error-free data to mobile robots at multi-meter ranges, with on-board decoding drawing 0.3 mA ($97\%$ less current than Bluetooth Low Energy). We demonstrate Phaser fully powering gram-scale battery-free robots to nearly 2x higher speeds than prior work while simultaneously controlling them to navigate around obstacles and along paths. Code, an open-source design guide, and a demonstration video of Phaser is available at https://mobilex.cs.columbia.edu/phaser.