Funder: Heriot-Watt University – Renishaw Strategic Alliance
PI: Dr Yuan Ding
Period: 1st Jan. 2025 ~ 30th Jun. 2028
Funding: £37k
Research Scope: This project will focus on the development of retrodirective radio technology to enable simultaneous high-efficiency wireless power transfer (WPT) and reliable wireless data link via backscattering in complex factory machinery wireless environments, i.e., rich, strong and dynamic wireless multi-paths due to surrounding metal structures, some of which are constantly moving.

Retrodirective radio technology will be further developed in this project:
• With the capability of automatic beam focusing, and thus energy focusing, in complex radio environments, the energy density at targets (which can be static or constantly moving) will be greatly enhanced. This will massively improve the efficiency of WPT. With sufficiently harvested energy, the low-power active wireless transmissions, such as the FHSS used in the RMP24-micro, can be established with no or less frequent battery replacement.
• Passive backscatter communication (BackCom) in conjunction with retrodirective radios for both pilot signal downlink and re-transmitted signal uplink provides a suitable solution for reducing the power consumption of wireless links. BackCom technology uses varying load impedances terminating an antenna to manipulate the scattered electromagnetic fields and thus convey information. Crucially, BackCom removes the need for locally generated radio carrier waves, thus, reducing the power consumption by another 2 or 3 orders comparing with the active counterparts.