Phaser

Set Phasers to Stun: Beaming Power and Control to Mobile Robots with Laser Light

Charles J. Carver^*, Hadleigh Schwartz^*, Toma Itagaki, Zachary Englhardt^†, Kechen Liu, Megan Graciela Nauli Manik, Chun-Cheng Chang^†, Vikram Iyer^†, Brian Plancher^‡, and Xia Zhou

^*Co-Primary Authors

Department of Computer Science, Columbia University; ^†Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington; ^‡Barnard College, Columbia University

Abstract

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 per- formance with battery-free autonomous robots. Phaser delivers optical power densities of over 110 mW/cm2 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.

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