Samenvatting

Research and development of robots which can support elderly or disabled people is pursued to increase the quality of home care. With the ever increasing quality and functions of robots, full-time care by these robots becomes feasible. To make the robot function without any human interferences, the robot should function autonomously and be able to recharge by itself.
Increasing the quality of the charging process of autonomous docking improves the overall quality of autonomous robots. The currently used docking station is susceptible to damage caused by small errors in the docking process, resulting in electrical sparks. The idea of the robot is that it can operate autonomously, while damage to the charging mechanism makes human interference necessary.
By researching complete systems, charging principles and docking methods, a new docking station was designed. Through use of a different charging principle that uses magnetic fields instead of electricity to transfer energy, electrical sparks cannot occur, thus making it less susceptible to damage.
To decrease the occurring errors when docking, a simple yet effective docking method is proposed. The docking method uses available vision systems on a robot to identify a part of the docking station and move towards it.
Tests concluded that the efficiency of the energy transfer can go as high as 95%. The tested docking method shows that it is possible to reach the required efficiency even with small alignment errors.
The resulting docking station provides a better way to charge robots without human interference. Optimisation of the system is still required, but the first test results are promising and show the feasibility of the system.