Dynamic Wireless Charging for Inspection Robots Based on Decentralized Energy Pickup Structure

Abstract

To deal with the problems of charging for inspection robots in substations such as frequent charging, complex mechanical interface, and insufficient battery capacity, a dynamic wireless charging system is proposed. The structure design of energy pickup device and the indispensable positioning strategy is presented in this paper. First, the dynamic wireless charging systems based on centralized energy pickup and decentralized energy pickup (DEP) are investigated and the unified circuit model is built for two kinds of systems simultaneously. Based on the comparison of working performances, the DEP structure is selected as the pickup device in this paper. Then, the positioning scheme is realized based on imitative relaying coil structure including the DEP device and the additional sensor coil. A switching control strategy of the segmented transmitting coils is proposed further to implement the dynamic wireless charging for inspection robots. The theoretical analyses are validated by the relevant experiments.