Wireless Charging
Back in 2012, I picked up energy harvesting as one of my major project for wireless communications masters at NUS. Towards the end of masters I came up with a commercial idea of using energy harvesting for charging. Thus for summer that year, I ended up attending founders institute @foundersInstitute with idea of somehow commercializing wireless energy transfer. We got a team of friends, with my flatmate @shuvanprashant PhD in physics, and a friend @alokpathakmusic from electronics, and another friend from MS- mechatronics.
I proposed using wireless charging at short distance, after meandering for weeks with best use case, we ended up pursuing wireless charging for robots. Thus FLUXCHARGE @fluxcharge came into existence. [1]
When we realized that patent would be a major issue, which at that time was with @Witricity [2], we had to give up on the idea after working on it for around four months.
As @elonmusk said recently in an interview with Sam Altman “there does seem to be a time for a particular technology when they are at steep point on inflexion curve…”
Today when I read hackerne.ws article[3] on apple pursuing wireless charging with company called @energous , it all came back. I did a quick homework of the situation and things have not changed much in four years.[4] But application wise now we have robots flying in skies more than ever, and autonomous robots on road. Now the application of wireless charging would be immense. There was a research going at Microsoft research labs to charge electronics using a light beam. [5]
There are two major companies now pursuing it.
Also from R&D point of view my prof (Dr. Rui Zhang) from NUS is still pursuing how to wireless charging using wireless signals[6]. I will update post once I get more info.
Reference
1. http://www.slideshare.net/arunabh010/fluxcharge-wireless-chargers-for-mobile-robotics
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12508409
6. https://www.ece.nus.edu.sg/stfpage/elezhang/publication_SWIPT.html
