Dynamic wireless power transfer (DWPT) has attracted significant interest due to its ability to transfer power to moving electric vehicles. Most existing DWPT research focuses on vehicles traveling along fixed paths. However, modern warehouses increasingly employ indoor electric vehicles (IEVs), such as autonomous mobile robots, that move along non-fixed paths. Although several solutions have been proposed for large-area DWPT systems applicable to IEVs with non-fixed trajectories, these approaches are predominantly based on inductive DWPT. Such systems require a large number of densely arranged transmitting coils and expensive ferrite pads, resulting in high system cost. To the authors’ best knowledge, no published work has addressed large-area capacitive DWPT systems for IEVs moving along non-fixed paths. This paper aims to fill this research gap. The main novelty of this work is the first proposal of a capacitive DWPT system for lightweight IEVs operating along non-fixed paths. The feasibility of the proposed solution is validated through simulation studies conducted in PSIM. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DWPT system, employing an advanced transmitting-metal-plate activation strategy, can maintain an almost constant mutual capacitance, thereby ensuring a smooth output voltage at the receiving side for a moving IEV.
Stepins et al. (Thu,) studied this question.