Initial Developments of Image-Recognition-Aided Microwave Power Transmission System for Smartphone Charging

Smartphones have become the most popular mobile device in the world over the course of the past decade. However, most users are annoyed with inconvenient power charging experiences with cables. Although Qi-compatible wireless charging pads are available on the market, it doesn’t seem qualified as an authentic wireless charging experience for smartphones. We are now proposing an intelligent wireless charging system for smartphones using microwave power transmission and image recognition. The image-recognition-aided WPT system enables to provide users with an authentic wireless charging experience. In this paper, synthesizer ICs MAX2871 were employed to generate appropriately phase-shifted signals responding to the real-time location of a receiving antenna recognized by an image recognition algorithm based on Open CV. Circuit Boards for the synchronized synthesizers and power amplifier ICs were developed. The software for image recognition was installed on Raspberry Pi 4, which wrote necessary configurations to the registers of MAX2871 via SPI interface. We confirmed that the image-recognition-aided WPT successfully improved received power at every measurement point in the horizontal range of -150 mm to 150 mm when the transmission distance was 420 mm.