Rotoye's BATMON and BatCha Look to Simplify Battery Management for Drones and Robots

Roboticist and remote control pilot Eohan George is looking to produce a smart battery management system, dubbed BATMON, alongside a battery charging system dubbed BatCha — claiming the two make an ideal pairing for everything from drone projects to mobile robotics.

"BATMON is the lightweight BMS for your batteries and BatCha Charger is the solution to charge your battery as simply as you’d charge a phone's battery," George claims. "The combined power of BatCha and BATMON provides simplicity for using batteries while providing easy tracking capabilities for all your batteries."

"BATMON is a Battery Management System (BMS) that monitors the battery parameters, and performs activities such as cell balancing to keep the battery ready for action. BatCha reads the status of the battery from its BATMON so as to determine how to charge the battery, if it’s safe to charge the battery etc. We believe BatCha is the first charger with the right-to-repair and an open firmware."

The idea is to connect a BATMON to a traditional non-smart battery using two 3D-printed parts and five tools, where it can use its sensors — and, handily, a 128-bit unique identifier and user-assignable name — to track the battery's statistics. These can be monitored using PX4, Ardupilot, ROS on a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller - and are automatically communicated to BatCha, the charging side of the system.

BatCha, meanwhile, offers two ports with up to 20A charging current, support for 3S-12S batteries, Wi-Fi connectivity, and a bright OLED display, with claimed protection against over- and under-temperature, over- and under-voltage charging conditions. An integrated battery profiler, meanwhile, lets it learn the specifications of a given battery and communicate that to BATMON.

"BATMON started as an effort to provide electrical monitoring and profiling for a safety-critical research drone," George explains of the project and the origin of his company, Rotoye. "It was able to mitigate crashes by providing real time cell specific telemetry to our ground stations."

"However, it was soon clear that the smart battery ecosystem for mobile robotics was too fragmented, closed, and proprietary. The team strives to remove the barriers to adopting smart batteries, as it's time they are ubiquitous."

This isn't George's first attempt to get the project off the ground: He originally ran a crowdfunding campaign for BATMON alone, which closed in February last year having failed to reach its relatively modest $7,800 goal — a lot lower than the $38,000 he's seeking this time around.

George is funding the project via Kickstarter, where physical rewards are available starting at $675 for two BATMON units and a single BatCha charger. Rewards are expected to begin shipping in May 2022.