Design and experiment for realization of laser wireless power transmission for small unmanned aerial vehicles

Currently various types of aircraft booming and maturing, however, their long-time navigational capability should be improved urgently. This paper aims at studying laser power beaming, which includes the technology of high-efficient photoelectric conversion and APT(acquiring, pointing and tracking) technology, to provide power for flying UAV(unmanned aerial vehicles) and improve their flight endurance. The experiment of testing different types of solar cells under various conditions has been done to choose the solar cell which has the highest photoelectric conversion rate and find its most sensitive wavelength. In addition, the charge management module has been chose on the base of the characteristics of lithium batteries. Besides, a laser APT system was designed and set up, at the same time FSM (Fast Scan Mirror) control program and digital image processing program were used to control the system. The success of the indoor experiment of scan-tracking and charging for the moving UAV model via laser proves that this system is workable. And in this experiment, the photoelectric conversion rate of the whole system is up to 17.55%.