A review of robotic charging for electric vehicles

Abstract

This paper reviews the technical aspects of robotic charging for Electric Vehicles (EVs), aiming to identify research trends, methods, and challenges. It implemented the Systematic Literature Review (SLR), starting with the formulation of research question; searching and collecting articles from databases, including Web of Science, Scopus, Dimensions, and Lens; selecting articles; and data extraction. We reviewed the articles published from 2012 to 2022 and found that the number of publications increased exponentially. The top five keywords were electric vehicle, robotic, automatic charging, pose estimation, and computer vision. We continued an in-depth review from the points of view of autonomous docking, charging socket detection-pose estimation, plug insertion, and robot manipulator. No article used a camera, Lidar, or Laser as the sensor that reported successful autonomous docking without position error. Furthermore, we identified two problems when using computer vision for the socket pose estimation and the plug insertion: low robustness against different socket shapes and light conditions; inability to monitor excessive plugging force. Using infrared to locate the socket yielded more robustness. However, it requires modification of the socket on the vehicle. A few articles used a camera and force/torque sensors to control the plug insertion based on different control approaches: model-based control and data-driven machine learning. The challenges were to increase the success rate and shorten the time. Most researchers used commercial 6-DOF robot manipulators, whereas a few designed lower-DOF robot manipulators. Another research challenge was developing a 4-DOF robot manipulator with compliance that ensures a 100% success rate of plug insertion.