DARPA fellowship funds airborne recharging study for UAVs

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The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded funding for continuing work into wireless technology that recharges unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in flight.

Dr. Ifana Mahbub demonstrates the Millibox anechoic chamber measurement setup for characterizing the antenna’s performance - The University of Texas at Dallas

Dr Ifana Mahbub, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, has been awarded the DARPA Director’s Fellowship to continue her far-field wireless power transfer (power beaming) research that could have applications beyond UAVs.

“Our first goal is to deliver as much power as possible over a longer distance,” said Mahbub, a Texas Instruments Early Career Fellow and director of the Integrated Biomedical, RF Circuits and Systems Lab in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

One of the challenges of power beaming at far distances is preventing electromagnetic waves from scattering along the way. To solve that problem, Mahbub and her team use phased-array antennas to steer the electromagnetic waves along a targeted path.

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“The signal can go in undesired directions,” Mahbub said in a statement. “Our goal is to engineer the waveform so that we can minimise the path loss.”

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far-field wireless power transfer