Solar Integrated Wireless Drone Charging System for Smart City Applications

Drone has taken over the market by storm, with sales of $14.1b in 2018 to over $22.5b in 2021 and is expected to grow to $42.8b by 2025. Photography and Nature documentary have drastically changed with the integration of drone technology. Smart cities are equipping themselves with surveillance drones for safety and monitoring applications. However, a drone is a power-hungry device that exhausts its battery within a few minutes. Therefore, they have to be recharged frequently or replace the exhausted battery with a charged one. The battery swapping process requires human intervention and thus limits the autonomous drone application. To make a drone fully autonomous, Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) using the Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) technique was adopted in this study. IPT allows power transfer to a few centimetres efficiently with few losses. The proposed WPT for the drone system was practically implemented with the incorporation of solar cells. The system was tested under different solar lighting conditions to charge the drone's battery efficiently. At 0 cm lateral misalignment and 7 mm vertical alignment, the average power transferred was approximately 13W at 88.5% efficiency. The drone battery was fully charged in 22 minutes at a fast-balance charging condition. Comparison results provide insight into the deployability of the autonomous WPT drone charging in remote areas.