Set Phasers to Stun: Beaming Power and Control to Mobile Robots with Laser Light
Charles J. Carver, Hadleigh Schwartz, Toma Itagaki, Zachary Englhardt, Kechen Liu, Megan Graciela Nauli Manik, Chun-Cheng Chang, Vikram Iyer
Abstract
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 semiautomatic 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<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> 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: mobilex.cs.columbia.edu/phaser
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2025_setphaserstostun,
title = {Set Phasers to Stun: Beaming Power and Control to Mobile Robots with Laser Light},
author = {Charles J. Carver and Hadleigh Schwartz and Toma Itagaki and Zachary Englhardt and Kechen Liu and Megan Graciela Nauli Manik and Chun-Cheng Chang and Vikram Iyer and Brian Plancher and Xia Zhou},
booktitle = {IROS 2025},
year = {2025}
}