Matt Carlson is the Vice President of Business Development at WiBotic Inc, a company that provides reliable wireless power solutions to charge aerial, mobile and aquatic robot systems. Why are wireless charging solutions so important to the future of robotics? Robots need the ability to autonomously charge for most applications. It simply isn't cost effective to hire a staff of workers to manage battery charging or battery swapping. However, most autonomous charging today is done using docking stations that require physical mating of electrical contacts.

Apple acquired Power by Proxi in October 2017. One of the first patent applications surfacing from Power by Proxi under Apple's name showed that their expertise was with an "object detection system." Such a system is crucial on a multi-device charging pad like AirPower. A user may pull their iPhone out of their pocket to charge it on AirPower and accidentally place along with it an aluminum gum wrapper, some loose change or a transit pass with a magnetic strip on the mat which could cause havoc if not a fire if the charging coils are accidentally overheated. Apple has both acquired and filed patents (01 & 02) working on this problem of foreign objects dumped on a charging pad.