 Last night we talked to somebody about doing infrared charging. Today we're going to talk to Ali Hajimiri about guru which is millimeter wave wireless charging. What do you have to show us here today? So we are using millimeter wave signals and waves to transfer energy from a source what we call a generation unit to a device and you can use this energy wireless power for charging devices or powering them any kind of device anything from your phone from your mouse kind of like your keyboard or any IoT device and what we can do we can do it without any moving parts we use our what we call the RF lensing smart RF lensing we can create these very small focus points and focus the energy in one area which basically enables you to transfer the energy where you want and nowhere else. So you're not wasting a lot of energy by flooding a whole room with it or you know heating you up or whatever but it just goes targeted to specific spots right exactly it goes exactly where you want and when you want and as much as you want and not nowhere else. So we have audio listeners as well so we've got a big guru thing above us on a false ceiling and then we've got a couple of charging pads here our battery banks. Yeah so what I call we call this that we call them recovery units are used so this is a demonstration of how you can actually recover this can be incorporated into your device but right now we are as a demonstration we are using it a separate thing and what you can see is that the energy is highly localized so what you see here is that basically we are sending energy to this particular place and as you can point what you can see is that it's going just there and nowhere else so now he's moving one of these recovery devices over the pad and it's lighting up when he gets there and you can actually feel the the heat from it right right exactly so what you can see is that actually you can actually even transfer it from one location to another location so if you actually hit it and ask it to transfer from one location without any moving action you can go from one place to another so you are now going from pad one to pad two so what you can see this aren't those aren't optical lenses that are all electronically controlled so it's electronic steering and what that does it basically sends the energy from it by controlling the timing it sends the energy exactly where you need so for example what you can see here is that you can actually see that it's concentrated in this area and you can see it's very very narrow focus right we can see it's a very concentrated area of energy right and what it is is that it's nowhere else it's not on you it's not on me it's anywhere else and you know what you can do the other thing is that you can actually send it from one location to another by selecting a different location now it's here so he's just he's just switched to the other location yes exactly and I think what happened right now is that they're kind of so what the other thing that it does it basically activates the so it has a safety mechanism so if you actually get in the way and if you want to kind of control it after a couple of seconds it's on being blocked so it shuts it down so you don't expose people unnecessarily although this this is radio signals that we believe are basically safe for from an operation because they're non-ionizing but also why waste it right correct exactly so how do you turn it off if I wanted to now not be wasting any of that energy so so the device only transmits energy when there is a device that says I need energy so it will have to be an active request okay okay that makes sense so without an active request there would not be any transfer of power I got you okay we're gonna cut here and we're gonna go to another location and see something else cool in the same area all right so what we have here is what we call a rovey so it's basically a roving generation unit so this is a robot that's actually used to charge and send energy to other devices so the idea here is that you have one of these things in your house or in your retail store and it moves around finds devices that need energy and power and they will send power to them so for example right now this is powering this light bulb that here you can see that I have a light bulb that's on and if I put my hand in front of it you can see that it's actually wirelessly powered from that because I can block it by doing that all right I'm gonna get down here I'm looking around there's no batteries there's no wires a light bulb is lit up because the rovey is pointed at exactly it's transmitting energy to it and the rovey can go from one location to another location and finds another device there it goes it's moving down it's going to turn the corner down here it's going to go over to another light bulb right this is very exciting and what's happening is that the device goes and finds the next thing that's requesting it exactly so the next device that's requesting power and basically going there from here and what you see here is that it's basically sending it and sending power to this device and now you can see that this it's this device that's being wirelessly powered so the robot came up turned a corner and then turned itself and rotated until it was pointed at the device that was requesting power exactly and the idea here is that you have something like this in your home and it's kind of like going around and watering your plan so automatically goes around and at night or during the off hours it goes and finds devices one of those vacuums exactly like and then it would go around and find it and operate or and whenever it runs low on power it goes and charges itself and then it comes back the labor savings in a business I could see that being a lot you can think about it both both at home and as well as retail stores or warehouses where you need you have a lot of devices that right now are being operated off of a battery all of the smart devices smart home devices all of the IOT's and now what you have is that you have you don't have to worry about them because there's somebody constantly taking care of them which is this little Roe v so now we haven't actually talked about loss so so transmitting the energy over the air is going to have loss what how efficient is this it's quite the transfer over air for this frequency is very efficient for the distances we are talking about we are going over tens of meters man and tens of feet and all those things and what happens is that at these distances the loss at the frequencies we are talking about is quite low now if you go there what's quite low give me a number here and the loss in the air is very small it's actually a couple of percent so so but but what happens is that once you get farther than a certain distance depending on the size of what we call the recovery unit which is the unit that actually controls the recovers the power and depending on the size of that a fraction of that power will be recovered so if you'll go far and far and far it's just a law of physics you will drop in terms of the amount of power that you receive but over distances that the system is designed for a good fraction of that power is recovered and by good fraction again you mean a couple just a couple percent so I would say no I mean it they thought from the power that's radiated kind of sent out transmitted to the power that's kind of recovered you're thinking about something like 50% of one five 50% 50% loss no 50% of that power would be recovered it turned into DC power but it gives it a 50% loss isn't it correct yes yes it is yes and what it does it basically is a way of what it gives you the convenience of moving around and basically being able to have an powering of the device is going from a an active activity that you have to think about remember yeah definitely right back to the robot remember the old days when we had to go and actively download our emails and now it happens in the background so we are making charging and turning it from an active activity to a passive background activity that sounds nice that sounds nice let's move on to the next station very good all right now we're at station three yes and this is what we call a desk unit so this is a smaller version of our room system that we saw earlier and what it is is basically a system that you can put on your desk this is a prototype of the system that you can put on a desk and you can charge use it to power and charge all of your devices from your phone to your let's say laptop to your mouse and keyboard wireless mouse and keyboards things of that sort for the audio people what we're seeing here looks like a like an old overhead projector if anybody's old enough to know what those look like a bigger kind of like a desk lamp or something like a large desk lamp yeah and then what happens is that now I'm pushing what the number one basically telling it to power send power to that light so that light bulb there's no battery in it you're just sending transferring the light bulb just requested yes correct and then it has turned on the light bulbs it is a kind of a decent size light bulb it's not one of those tiny ones and it's basically if you're getting powered through this device and then what you can do if I push another button basically sit telling it to send it to the phone now and what you can see here now the phone charging is showing so like your graphics of the battery charging there so when he pressed the button towards the phone there's a he's got a folio and you've got one of the detectors one of the receivers there on the on the folio case exactly and basically that recovery unit is recovering the power that's being generated here and feeding it to the phone and the phone is using it to charge itself right now and then you can have it for small iot devices you can see the little tiny strip on the left-hand side that says guru on it and that tiny recovery unit recovery unit so you can see tiny like half the size of my little finger exactly and then that's basically just not only powering that display but also charging the battery inside that so this is like a surrogate this is an example of a what we call an iot device would look like and what the requirement so you have something that small that can attach to your iot device you can think about it as your camera the wireless camera or security camera because security cameras they're wired they call them wireless but they still need to be plugged in so you can have something like that and then you can have them basically operating or your sensors or any kind of device these distances would you have a lot less loss this be more efficient yet all of these distances that you're talking about as long as there are several like tens of feet the distance is basically the loss is pretty low for that that's not the biggest factor okay okay well this is very cool if people want to learn more about it where do they find these this technology so you can look at our web page which is guru.ink and so that's our web page and they can also contact us at info at guru.ink and they can find a lot of information about it or they can come to our booth at 41558 at CES great thank you very much appreciate your time thank you very much