Stable and High-Efficiency Wireless Power Transfer System for Robotic Capsule Using a Modified Helmholtz Coil

Magnetic resonance-based wireless power transfer system offers a promising solution to overcome power limitations typically encountered by capsule endoscopy. Despite of much attention in this area, aspects such as power stability and power transfer efficiency remain suboptimal and therefore investigation for further improvement is still required. This paper presents a method to improve power stability as well as power transfer efficiency for wireless capsule endoscopy. A new power transmission coil capable of producing uniform magnetic field is proposed to improve power stability through uniform field that at the same time minimizes the unnecessary peak electromagnetic exposure. To improve power transfer efficiency, a mixed resonance scheme is employed. Our experimental results show improvement over existing methods where the proposed system attained power stability of 94.62% and power transfer efficiency of 4.9% under worst position of the receiving coil. Furthermore, the proposed transmitting coil provides additional advantage, where it minimized the unnecessary peak electromagnetic exposure by 26% as compared to the conventional Helmholtz coil-based system. We believe the proposed system will open new direction for future wireless capsule endoscopy and can also be useful in other industrial applications.