Ben Waters on the latest wireless charging strategies

As robot fleets grow, charging becomes an operational challenge. Understanding how to optimize charging for fleets of mobile robots is critical to getting the best performance from the fleet throughout the day.

With growing implementations, charging is becoming more of a question of how long a battery lasts or how quickly it can recharge. Charging strategy can impact fleet uptime, facility infrastructure, maintenance requirements and even the size of batteries robot manufacturers need to carry.

Ben Waters, CEO of WiBotic, recently joined The robot report Podcast to discuss how these considerations are changing as robot fleets grow.

He also discussed charging opportunities, fast charging trade-offs, WiBotic’s move towards higher power systems, and how charging data could help operators identify power issues.

This is an excerpt from the podcast interview. Listen to the full audio wherever you get your podcasts or online in the show notes.

WiBotic expands beyond traditional robotics markets

What has changed recently at WiBotic and how is the market maturing?

Waters: Overall, WiBotic has diversified into a few different markets, but in the meantime robotics has really grown, as we all know, certainly in the last year or two.

This has been a big motivator for us in pursuing entry into some adjacent markets. Take, for example, floor care, medical carts, space and defense applications, all markets that really use the same product as our long-time robotics customers from a wireless charging and autonomous charging perspective.

Let’s flash forward a year where we will focus on this and put all the internal operational, sales and engineering teams in place to support the different markets. Here we are a year and a half later, and robotics is booming everywhere you look, right? I mean, all of our legacy robotics customers have seen significant volume growth this year.

We are seeing tremendous growth in the adoption of antimicrobial resistance in the automotive industry. We are seeing growth in external robotic inspection for power substations and many external applications are growing. And then there’s the wild card of humanoids.

Wireless charging is a really interesting dynamic in humanoids as far as what it can enable and how it can improve uptime and eliminate some of these Achilles heels that humanoids have around downtime.

Opportunity pricing changes the equation for large robot fleets

As mobile robot fleets grow, where does charging start to create operational friction?

Waters: The big trend where pricing is related to operational impact is what we’ve probably already talked about with Gene [Demaitre]. WiBotic has always been seen as a great opportunity for wireless charging. But, as we know, it takes some time for fleets to become large enough for it all to really make sense. And I think we’ve finally gotten to that point. And what I’m referring to is opportunity charge.

So there’s the concept of “Don’t just put chargers on the sides of factories.” And then, when the robot’s battery gets to 20%, that robot could be on the other side of the factory. Now he has to drive 10 minutes while paying attention to everything else and ignoring fleet management for doing a task, even if he is in an area where a task needs to be done, right? Because he has to go into office.

This strategy, which is probably easier to implement on a small scale, because you can really just say, “If one of the batteries on these robots reaches 20%, stop and go to the charging station.” It’s pretty easy to implement. This gets really complicated and leads to a lot of unwanted downtime when fleets start to get bigger. Even for fleets of 20 to 40 people, this becomes a bottleneck.

We need to implement opportunity pricing. And there’s no point in doing opportunity charging with anything other than wireless. Because if you did this with contacts, your robots would hit the contacts many more times. And even if you had the strongest contact in the world, it would still require maintenance sooner or later, for all the chargers in your fleet.

If the robot performs a task and has 10 seconds to sit there, well, a charging station should be placed right where the robot will naturally sit.

You could look at that too. It only recharges for 10 seconds, but if you do it often enough, it adds serious juice to fleet-wide batteries and allows these things to run 24/7.

You can eliminate it completely. Simply allow robots to stay in the circuits they operate in when you use opportunity cooldown. That’s really the trend that we’ve seen and the demand that we’ve received, and the main reason why companies are looking for wireless power.

Charging should be part of the robot design process

How should companies think about charging during system design instead of treating it as an accessory at the end?

Waters: If I boil it down to three things, I think companies should be thinking about energy infrastructure. I’ll get back to some details on these. Where are your electrical outlets and how many do you have, and are they rated for enough power to handle all the chargers you want to deploy? So think about it in advance. This bites people. We have seen a lot if you think about it too late.

I think people are really questioning themselves. How big a battery do I need? Do I need a battery that supports eight hours of battery life? Do I need a battery that supports super fast charging? In the world of batteries, most of these types of things get confused with each other.

They could over-design it. They may add a battery cost that is excessive compared to what they really need, especially if they are thinking about charging strategies.

We still hear a lot of customers say, “We need to load these things as fast as humanly possible.” And we will listen and assume that customers made the right choices for the right reasons.

But sometimes, we have a strong relationship with someone, we get into these arguments. It’s not necessarily our job to push back, but we’re curious and we’re a friendly company to work with. So sometimes we ask ourselves: “Do you really want to always charge at 3°C? Have you seen a data sheet from the battery manufacturer that says what it will do for life? Is it worth it?”

And then the third thing for sure is maintenance. If you wait until you’ve already finished your project, and you’re starting to deploy it, and you haven’t thought about these things, then you will almost certainly get bitten by each of these things within at least a couple of months, if not sooner.

WiBotic develops chargers for outdoor robots, drones and humanoids

As WiBotic moves into new applications, how have its products evolved?

Waters: WiBotic has always tried to think about which product serves the maximum number of customers and people, right? We are not a consulting company where we customize every system.

When it comes to circuit development and system certification, we want to be a company that makes standard products and sells customers systems they can count on, support and certify.

We recently launched an IP65 rated version of the charger in our 1kW product family. When we first launched our 1kW product a couple of years ago, it was only available in the typical IP20 black box form factor.

So now we have an IP65 form factor, which is really necessary for outdoor applications and robotics. Very desirable for interior applications such as floor care where water and dust are an integral part of such systems.

We are currently actively developing two areas of innovation. One is size and weight. We are seeing a lot of interest in drone applications. WiBotic certainly has a long history with drones.

We’re developing lightweight, high-powered systems for drones, which happen to be pretty much the same thing humanoids need too.

The more mass you add to a humanoid, the more energy it will have to expend to balance that mass. And there isn’t much space. So yes, we are focusing on a lot of high-power, small form factor applications, as well as pushing the power of our current products up to the 3 kW level.