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Main Authors: Carver, Charles J., Schwartz, Hadleigh, Itagaki, Toma, Englhardt, Zachary, Liu, Kechen, Manik, Megan Graciela Nauli, Chang, Chun-Cheng, Iyer, Vikram, Plancher, Brian, Zhou, Xia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17865
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author Carver, Charles J.
Schwartz, Hadleigh
Itagaki, Toma
Englhardt, Zachary
Liu, Kechen
Manik, Megan Graciela Nauli
Chang, Chun-Cheng
Iyer, Vikram
Plancher, Brian
Zhou, Xia
author_facet Carver, Charles J.
Schwartz, Hadleigh
Itagaki, Toma
Englhardt, Zachary
Liu, Kechen
Manik, Megan Graciela Nauli
Chang, Chun-Cheng
Iyer, Vikram
Plancher, Brian
Zhou, Xia
contents We present Phaser, a flexible system that directs narrow-beam laser light to moving robots for concurrent wireless power delivery and communication. We design a semi-automatic calibration procedure to enable fusion of stereo-vision-based 3D robot tracking with high-power beam steering, and a low-power optical communication scheme that reuses the laser light as a data channel. We fabricate a Phaser prototype using off-the-shelf hardware and evaluate its performance with battery-free autonomous robots. Phaser delivers optical power densities of over 110 mW/cm$^2$ and error-free data to mobile robots at multi-meter ranges, with on-board decoding drawing 0.3 mA ($97\%$ less current than Bluetooth Low Energy). We demonstrate Phaser fully powering gram-scale battery-free robots to nearly 2x higher speeds than prior work while simultaneously controlling them to navigate around obstacles and along paths. Code, an open-source design guide, and a demonstration video of Phaser is available at https://mobilex.cs.columbia.edu/phaser.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_17865
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Set Phasers to Stun: Beaming Power and Control to Mobile Robots with Laser Light
Carver, Charles J.
Schwartz, Hadleigh
Itagaki, Toma
Englhardt, Zachary
Liu, Kechen
Manik, Megan Graciela Nauli
Chang, Chun-Cheng
Iyer, Vikram
Plancher, Brian
Zhou, Xia
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present Phaser, a flexible system that directs narrow-beam laser light to moving robots for concurrent wireless power delivery and communication. We design a semi-automatic calibration procedure to enable fusion of stereo-vision-based 3D robot tracking with high-power beam steering, and a low-power optical communication scheme that reuses the laser light as a data channel. We fabricate a Phaser prototype using off-the-shelf hardware and evaluate its performance with battery-free autonomous robots. Phaser delivers optical power densities of over 110 mW/cm$^2$ and error-free data to mobile robots at multi-meter ranges, with on-board decoding drawing 0.3 mA ($97\%$ less current than Bluetooth Low Energy). We demonstrate Phaser fully powering gram-scale battery-free robots to nearly 2x higher speeds than prior work while simultaneously controlling them to navigate around obstacles and along paths. Code, an open-source design guide, and a demonstration video of Phaser is available at https://mobilex.cs.columbia.edu/phaser.
title Set Phasers to Stun: Beaming Power and Control to Mobile Robots with Laser Light
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17865