Q-Charge: A Quadcopter-Based Wireless Charging Platform for Large-Scale Sensing Applications

Wireless charging technologies have attracted much attention from both academia and industry due to their great potential of freeing devices from wires and batteries, becoming one of the key research areas in recent years. Many platforms have been designed based on different charging technologies for a wide range of scenarios, including structural monitoring, habitat monitoring, wearable devices, volcano monitoring, and so on. However, these existing platforms cannot be deployed quickly and flexibly in many harsh environments, resulting in high deployment cost. In this article, we propose Q-Charge, a wireless charging platform integrated with a quadcopter, which is able to provide desirable energy for large-scale sensing applications. Q-Charge is composed of three components: an energy transfer module, a programmable quadcopter unit, and a cloud server. A wireless charger is installed on a quadcopter to achieve remote energy delivery, and a sink node retrieves data packets from sensors and forwards them to the cloud via a service gateway. Our platform has been successfully implemented for building structure and farmland monitoring, which demonstrates Q-Charge to be effective and efficient.