Dynamic Resonant-Inductive Wireless Power Transfer System for Automated Guided Vehicles with Reduced Number of Position Sensors

This paper deals with the position detection of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in dynamic resonant-inductive wireless power transfer (WPT) systems. A position detection is necessary to activate the correct transmitting coil. One of the simplest and most effective approaches for a position detection method is to use optical or magnetic position sensors for each coil. However, due to needing a high number of sensors, this technique is relatively expensive. Therefore, an AGV position detection technique based on a reduced number of optical or magnetic sensors (by a factor of two) is proposed. The proposed detection technique was verified experimentally by using a scaled-down prototype of the dynamic WPT system. The proposed approach can be easily implemented by uploading a specific program code to a microcontroller. The microcontroller with the code developed by us was used for processing data from AGV position detection sensors, activating a suitable transmitting coil and controlling an inverter of the dynamic WPT system. As shown by the experiments, due to the proposed approach for the position detection of AGVs and activation of transmitting coils, the number of the position detection sensors is reduced by a factor of two, leading to reductions in the overall cost and level of complexity of the dynamic WPT system without degrading its performance.