Laser charging system for mobile devices has built-in safety
System can charge phones and tablets completely wirelessly from a distance of up to 12m
Although wireless charging for mobile devices via induction pads has been available for some years, they still can't be charged without being relatively close to a power socket. Engineers at the University of Washington in Seattle have now developed a method that could change all this; sending power to device using a laser beam from some distance across the room.
The system, developed by Shyam Gollakota and colleagues at the Paul G Allen School of computer science and engineering, uses a narrow and invisible laser to send power to an adapted smartphone, but the team believes that there is no reason it could not be used to charge a suitably equipped tablet, laptop or camera, or even to supply power to a desktop computer.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, the team describes how they incorporated safety into the system.
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