Autonomous Charging of Electric Vehicles in Industrial Environment

Modern industrial manufacturing involves several manually and automated driven vehicles - not only for logistics and production purposes, but also for services, maintenance, resources supply and cleaning. These different types of vehicles are increasingly driven by electric powertrains that operate in the production halls, warehouses and other involved areas. Today, electric charging of these mobile devices is accomplished mainly manually and by use of a number of different not standardized charging interfaces, which leads to increased time and cost efforts. The paper evaluates different charging technologies for the use in industrial environments and introduces a new approach for automated, robot-controlled charging of electric vehicles, which is based on a standardized charging interface. The technology has been developed to fully automated charge different types of cars and other vehicles and consists of a vision system to identify the vehicle and the charging connector position in combination with a fully-controlled robotic system that plugs-in and -off the charging connector. In this way, the system is universally applicable for different types of autonomously and manually driven vehicles in a professional context, e.g. in production, logistics and warehouses.