Envision a drone that’s hovering high above a battlefield, providing life-saving intelligence to warfighters below without ever needing to land for fuel or new batteries. Picture autonomous robots working on a factory floor, freely moving around each other in perfect synchrony without ever needing to stop and recharge. Or imagine vehicles of all shapes and sizes speeding down a highway with neither combustion engines nor electric batteries under their hoods.
All of this and more might one day be possible thanks to wireless energy beaming, an emerging technology that could supercharge future devices.
From search-and-rescue to manufacturing, wireless power beaming could make all manner of operations more cost-effective, efficient, efficacious and even lifesaving by creating a continuous, uninterrupted source of power.
“Wireless power beaming promises to democratize energy,” said Chris Davlantes, founder and CEO of Reach Power, which is already using wireless power beaming to build products for everyone from the U.S. military to Toyota.
Davlantes and others on the front lines of the energy revolution believe a network of power beaming sources, fueled by the cloud, would dramatically change many aspects of life.
What is Wireless Power Beaming?
Much like an internet router beams a wireless signal to devices around a home, power beaming sends wireless electrical charges through the air to a plethora of gadgets and gizmos.
“It’s the concept of wirelessly transmitting energy from an area where it's in surplus to an area that’s in need,” Davlantes explained.
“That’s almost always done through electromagnetic waves, and it uses the energy-carrying nature of the wave to provide power and distance from meters and milliwatts to kilometers and kilowatts. Wireless power beaming, at large, has a transmitter sending out some form of electromagnetic wave and a receiver catching it.”
With some well-directed electromagnetic waves, drones, robots and eventually, cars can move around endlessly, unhindered by the need for charging downtime.
Drones: ‘Eyes in the Sky’
Military drones will likely be among the first devices to take advantage of wireless power beaming, according to Davlantes.
“First responders or members of the military can now have persistent eyes in the sky, where a drone provides overwatch and is looking out for them as they run a mission,” Davlantes said.
He pointed to a statistic from the Department of Defense that areas overwatched by drones are three times less likely to have human casualties.
“Now, these drones can be flown completely autonomously, without the constant need for battery swaps, reducing operator burden, increasing functionality and allowing personnel to focus on other things.”
An airborne UAV that’s fed constant power and requires zero downtime could save not only the lives of soldiers in battle, but also the lives of civilians after a natural disaster. In September 2024, for example, Hurricane Helene left millions of people in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina without power and water. Persistent drones powered by wireless power beams could survey flooded areas in search of people in need or deliver humanitarian supplies to those stranded in flood waters.
Roving Robots
Davlantes said robots have many practical use cases in manufacturing.
“If I have a fleet of autonomous mobile robots carrying boxes around an Amazon warehouse, I usually have two of those on chargers for everyone that’s in the field,” he said.
“If each of those robots cost me $100,000, then I don't want to have a bunch of these things sitting idle. With wireless power beaming, the robot charges itself up and it never has to come down. I can have a full fleet mobilized all the time and can save money by reducing the amount of my fleet and enabling new functionality for the robots to be able to operate for longer hours and with larger payloads.”
The technology can also increase crew safety by remotely charging sensors and devices that are perched in dangerous or hard-to-reach places at industrial facilities.
Can Electric Cars Be Charged Wirelessly?
Davlantes believes within the next 10 years people will be able to wirelessly supercharge electric vehicles as they drive down the road. These vehicles could become a node in a larger, interconnected network of wirelessly powered devices. This opens all kinds of new possibilities.
Currently, wireless power beaming has a powerful but limited range. A lot of work is being done to exponentially extend a transmitter’s potential reach. Among those working on the problem is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which recently invested in a team of researchers at The University of Texas.
“Our first goal is to deliver as much power as possible over a longer distance,” said Dr. Ifana Mahbub, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas.
“The signal can go in undesired directions, so our goal is to engineer the waveform so that we can minimize the path loss.”
Now imagine if power could be beamed not only through a factory corridor or down the block, but also beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The same thing can hold true if my drone is now no longer a drone, but is a space platform 20 kilometers away,” Davlantes said. “I can essentially put a solar farm in space that then orbits the Earth and beams power down to any place on the planet. I could have a full city whose infrastructure has failed, and I could send energy down to those in need.”
DARPA is just one of several entities hoping to eventually beam power over a distance of 200 kilometers, including by deploying lasers.
Revolutionizing the Energy Grid
As capabilities become more robust, an entire network of power beaming devices can take shape to benefit cities struggling with climate change and other challenges. Power can start jumping from an energy source to a billboard, from a billboard to a car, from a car to a drone and from a drone to people who need it below.
“There's been a lot of work done on renewable energy sources and new batteries, but not a lot on transmission,” Davlantes said.
“This is the third part of the energy sphere. The way we move energy today is the same as what we did in the 1900s. The ultimate goal of wireless power beaming is to be able to have a full power infrastructure that adapts to the needs of the community in real time. To build a new sort of distributed system where we can partner the algorithmic intelligence of all the machine learning algorithms that have come out lately and all the increased computation power with a flexible grid.”
Cloud Computing is Leading the Future
Essential to the function of this futuristic power grid is cloud computing, where machine learning algorithms already are helping to optimize energy distribution.
“As the network grows larger, managing that number of assets and the optimization protocol of how you route energy throughout this full web becomes too onerous for one set of hardware, so there is a drive to push these algorithms and their management into cloud computing,” Davlantes said.
“The cloud will absolutely become more important as these networks get deployed and as they grow, because the management of hundreds of thousands of little nodes becomes gargantuanly difficult as a problem. With the cloud, I can algorithmically determine the best way to allocate resources, and I can essentially rewire the grid every couple of milliseconds to better serve those consumers. You no longer need to have grid failures.”
Power outages can be catastrophic to both property and human life. In this way, cloud computing can help prevent deaths from potential grid failure.
By sending power to sensors, devices and nodes in otherwise inaccessible places, wireless power beaming also could stimulate the growth of edge computing.
With wireless power beaming comes the promise of continuous power — drones that can stay in the air for longer to rescue injured people from rubble, robots that can keep a factory running for cheaper and, before long, cars that don’t need to stop for battery or gas fill-ups. Coupled with cloud computing, the technology can create a network that’s responsive and always online.
“The flexibility imposed by wireless allows you to have a greener economy and allows the grid to adapt more towards the way that we currently are using it,” Davlantes concluded.
That could make life better for anyone who uses energy — in other words: practically everyone on the planet.
Chase Guttman is a technology writer. He’s also an award-winning travel photographer, Emmy-winning drone cinematographer, author, lecturer and instructor. His book, The Handbook of Drone Photography, was one of the first written on the topic and received critical acclaim. Find him at chaseguttman.com or @chaseguttman.
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