Wireless Energy Supply for a MAV Propulsion System

Wireless energy supply for an MAV propulsion system using microwave was developed. This system consists of three sub system; the transmitter system, the rectenna system, and the tracking system. In the transmitter system five horn antennas were used as the antenna elements for the phased array system and both the beam divergence and steering angle was about 9deg. Eight rectennas were arrayed in parallel to obtain enough power to drive the electric motor on the MAV(the voltage was 250mV and the current was 6.8mA) in rectenna system. In tracking system two units of antenna system with leaf pattern which received the linearly-polarized wave despite the MAV yaw angle were set in each axis(x, y) for tracking an MAV in a 2-Dimentional space. And three output voltages $V_{com},\;V_1$ and $V_2$ were loaded in the PC to detect if the distance between transmitter and receiver was not constant. Finally when the microwave beam was steered by the phased array system the output voltage from rectenna was measured at 62cm while the MAV circled around above the transmitter system.