Electric field in motion

Published May 10, 2020

Engineers at Stanford have build a proof-of-concept system that could (some day) (it’s always “some day,” isn’t it?) recharge electric cars while they’re driving down the road. It would work like a bigger version of wireless chargers for phones and other electronics: using an oscillating electric field. The trick was coming up with a way to efficiently charge something that was moving, because distance changes the required frequency. Next step: Scaling up in the lab to a system for recharging factory robots.