Chiba University and Finnish Startup Willo Partner to Power Entire Rooms Wirelessly

Wireless charging has long promised a world free of cables, yet in practice it has delivered something far more modest: a flat pad on a desk, a cradle beside a bed, a puck that demands exact placement within a few millimeters. On September 9, 2026, at Chiba University’s Nishi-Chiba Campus in Japan, that limitation took a step toward being dismantled. Chiba University and Willo Technologies, a deep tech startup based in Helsinki, Finland, signed a joint research agreement to study how wireless power behaves inside an enclosed three-dimensional space—a volume in which devices could, in principle, draw electricity at any position and in any orientation, with no pad, no alignment, and no line of sight.

The agreement was signed by Professor Hiroo Sekiya of Chiba University’s Graduate School of Informatics and Harri Santamala, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Willo Technologies. Under the terms of the collaboration, Professor Sekiya’s group will investigate how to maintain stable operation of devices within the enclosed space and will evaluate how power delivery is affected as the number of devices drawing power changes—including conditions in which people are present in the space. The work is expected to run for twelve months beginning in September 2026.

Willo calls the concept it is developing a three-dimensional power zone. The company, an Aalto University spin-off, is building enclosed spaces in which a device can draw power wherever it happens to sit within the volume, regardless of how it is oriented. This is a fundamentally different proposition from the inductive charging pads that dominate the consumer market today. A conventional pad couples a transmitter coil to a receiver coil over a short, well-defined gap; move the receiver a centimeter sideways and the coupling degrades sharply. In a three-dimensional power zone, by contrast, the entire enclosure participates in delivering energy, and a device’s position within that enclosure becomes far less critical.

The physics of such a system is demanding. When a transmitter fills a room-sized volume with oscillating electromagnetic fields, every object inside—every receiving device, every person, every piece of furniture—interacts with those fields. Devices enter and leave the space, move around, and change how much power they draw. Each of these events alters the electrical behavior of the overall system, changing the effective load that the power electronics must drive. Maintaining stable, efficient power delivery as these conditions shift is one of the central engineering challenges standing between laboratory demonstrations and a system that operates reliably in the real world.

This is precisely where Professor Sekiya’s expertise becomes relevant. Sekiya has built his career on high-frequency switching-mode power conversion, including the class-E and class-EF circuit families. These circuit topologies are prized in radio-frequency power electronics because the switching element operates as an ideal switch, minimizing the time it spends simultaneously carrying current and sustaining voltage—the condition in which losses are generated. That efficiency makes class-E and related architectures well suited to power delivery at megahertz frequencies, where wireless power transfer systems can achieve compact receiver designs and greater spatial freedom than kilohertz-frequency inductive systems allow.

Even more distinctive is his group’s specialization in load-independent wireless power transfer. In a conventional wireless power system, the output characteristics—voltage, current, and efficiency—vary as the load changes, and designers typically compensate with a feedback control loop that continuously measures the output and adjusts the operating point. Load-independent designs take a different route: by carefully synthesizing the impedance characteristics of the circuit network, the output can be maintained as the load changes without relying on any feedback loop at all. The group is one of the few in the world working extensively on this approach, and it has also published extensively on numerical and machine-learning-based design methods for high-frequency power electronic systems in leading international journals.

Professor Sekiya emphasized that extending these ideas from a single wireless power link to an entire enclosed space raises questions that remain open. “My group has worked for years on keeping high-frequency power delivery stable as the load changes. Extending this concept from a single wireless power link to an entire enclosed space raises many questions that remain open and answering them requires experimental measurement and validation in addition to simulation. I am very pleased to be working with Willo on these challenges, and I expect the knowledge gained through this collaboration to be useful well beyond the development of a single product or company,” he said. His point about experimental validation is significant: simulating an electromagnetic environment populated by moving devices and human bodies is extraordinarily complex, and real-world measurement remains indispensable for confirming that a design behaves as intended.

Willo’s leadership framed the collaboration as a deliberate choice of partner rather than a convenience. “Professor Sekiya’s group has carried out leading research on maintaining stable wireless power delivery under changing load conditions. This is one of the key challenges in powering an entire space rather than a single device, and it is a major reason why we chose to collaborate with Chiba University. The results of this research will help us refine the design of the three-dimensional power zones we develop. We are also pleased that Dr. Yutaro Komiyama, one of our engineering team members, earned his Ph.D. under Professor Sekiya’s supervision before joining us. His experience bridges the research conducted at Chiba University with our engineering efforts at Willo Technologies, further strengthening the connection between the two organizations,” said CEO Santamala. The presence of a shared alumnus on Willo’s engineering team gives the partnership an unusually direct channel between academic theory and commercial implementation.

The commercial logic behind the collaboration extends well beyond consumer gadgets. Japan produces a large share of the world’s precision equipment, sensors, and industrial robots—systems in which cables and connectors can impose significant constraints. A robot arm that must route power through a rotating joint, a sensor sealed inside a sterile or hermetic enclosure, or a tool that must be swapped in and out of a fixture hundreds of times a day all illustrate places where physical electrical contacts become points of wear, failure, and design compromise. An enclosed space that powers whatever is inside it, at any position and orientation, could remove those constraints entirely, which is why the concept has attracted attention well outside the smartphone-charging market.

Willo Technologies, which has raised 2.9 million euros to date, is still at an early stage, and the twelve-month research program announced with Chiba University is a research agreement rather than a product launch. But the collaboration captures a genuine inflection point in wireless power research. The field is moving from the question of whether devices can be charged without cables—largely answered—to the harder question of whether an entire volume of space can become a reliable, efficient power source for many devices at once, under continuously changing conditions. Answering that question will require exactly the combination this partnership brings together: a startup building the enclosed-space architecture, and an academic group with rare depth in the high-frequency, load-independent power electronics that must keep such a space stable. If the program succeeds, the knowledge gained is expected, in Sekiya’s words, to be useful well beyond the development of a single product or company—potentially shaping how an entire industry thinks about delivering power to the spaces people and machines inhabit.

Subject of Research: Three-dimensional wireless power transfer in enclosed spaces

Article Title: Chiba University and Finnish Deep Tech Startup Willo Technologies sign joint research agreement on three-dimensional wireless power

Article References: Chiba University and Finnish Deep Tech Startup Willo Technologies sign joint research agreement on three-dimensional wireless power. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: wireless power transfer, three-dimensional power zone, Chiba University, Willo Technologies, class-E amplifiers, load-independent operation, high-frequency power electronics, megahertz frequencies, Finland, Japan, joint research agreement, switching-mode power conversion