Design of a Low-Cost Wireless Charging Station Based on the Robotic Vision System

Physical training of autonomous robotic systems are often limited by battery capacity since the intelligent training cycles have to be halted for battery recharge. Many researchers have focused on various solutions of power management for autonomous robots. However, these solutions are usually custom-fitted for the specific applications, and would be difficult to be generalized to other autonomous robotic systems. In this paper, we propose to develop a low-cost wireless charging system based on the on-board vision/camera sensor. This design is capable of autonomous docking for the robot chassis without further external supervision. Specifically, we use the QR codes to label the charging station and establish the robot's camera vision system to recognize the dock. The robot will drive to the station automatically. The low-cost charging station is also designed for wireless charging of the robot. We present the specific designs of charging dock, wireless connection, and battery charging experiments explicitly. This low-cost wireless charging system provides advancements toward a fully autonomous physical training infrastructure for robotic navigation experiments.