A Thermoelectric Energy Harvesting System Assisted by A Piezoelectric Transducer Achieving 10-mV Cold-Startup and 82.7% Peak Efficiency

This article presents a 10mV-startup-voltage thermoelectric energy harvesting system, assisted by a piezoelectric generator (PEG) as a cold starter. It exploits the fact that when a thermoelectric energy harvesting system is implemented in a place where kinetic energy is also present, the PEG starter can provide a clock signal to start the...

Hierarchical Motion Planning and Tracking for Autonomous Vehicles Using Global Heuristic Based Potential Field and Reinforcement Learning Based Predictive Control

The autonomous vehicle is widely applied in various ground operations, in which motion planning and tracking control are becoming the key technologies to achieve autonomous driving. In order to further improve the performance of motion planning and tracking control, an efficient hierarchical framework containing motion planning and tracking...

A Highly Efficient Fully Integrated Active Rectifier for Ultrasonic Wireless Power Transfer

Ultrasonic wireless power transfer (WPT) has been proved to be a promising approach to power biomedical implants. To extract the energy generated from the transducer, a rectifier is typically required. Previous inductor-based rectifiers (SSHI and SECE) require a large off-chip inductor to achieve good performance, which is not desired for...

Performance Enhancement with a Capacitor-Scaling Design for SSHC Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Interfaces

Piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) has attracted much attention as an approach to exploit ambient vibrational energy to power self-sustained devices. Among the proposed interface circuits for PEH, Synchronized Switch Harvesting on Capacitor (SSHC) rectifier distinguishes itself since it achieves high power efficiency while requires no...

A Reconfigurable Cold-Startup SSHI Rectifier with 4X Lower Input Amplitude Requirement for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

Synchronized switch harvesting on inductor (SSHI) is an efficient active rectifier to extract energy generated from piezoelectric transducer in piezoelectric energy harvesting system. Unlike passive rectifiers, SSHI rectifiers require a power supply to drive synchronized switches. Unfortunately, there is no stable supply when the system starts...

A Nanopower 95.6% Efficiency Voltage Regulator with Adaptive Supply-Switching for Energy Harvesting Applications

A nanopower highly efficient low-dropout (LDO) regulator for energy harvesting (EH) applications is presented in this paper. The LDO is fully autonomous with a bandgap reference (BGR) featuring a novel bandgap supply-switching (SS) topology, an over-voltage protection (OVP), a under-voltage lockout (UVLO) and control block to obtain stable...

Audio-Visual Wake Word Spotting in MISP2021 Challenge: Dataset Release and Deep Analysis

In this paper, we describe and release publicly the audio-visual wake word spotting (WWS) database in the MISP2021 Challenge, which covers a range of scenarios of audio and video data collected by near-, mid-, and far-field microphone arrays, and cameras, to create a shared and publicly available database for WWS. The database and the code ...