Autonomous Electric Vehicle Charging System

Electric vehicle (EV) adoption has surpassed the growth of charging infrastructure. As the demand for charging stations surpass the supply, expanding charging infrastructure for consumers is crucial to improving the experience of owning and maintaining an EV. One solution is to simply provide more charging stations; however, this requires significant upfront hardware and space cost. In addition, parking spots allocated for EVs should only be used by EVs, forcing manufacturers to make a decision on the number of EV and non-EV parking spots. Current charging stations also have their own problems. When an EV is finished charging, any additional time it spends in the charging location is time that another EV could be using to charge itself. Innovative new products are necessary to create an adequate charging network. In this work, a mobile autonomous robot which charges parked EVs at any location with its own battery is presented. We created a proof-of-concept autonomous charging robot to demonstrate feasibility and motivate future work. The goal is to provide three main decoupled functionalities: parking lot navigation, EV plug guidance, and robot battery swapping. The current iteration meets these functionalities using a TurtleBot to navigate a mock parking lot, new designs and prototypes for swapping batteries, and a robotic arm paired with a computer vision algorithm to guide a 3D printed plug. Ongoing challenges for future iterations involve integrating the main functionalities and dealing with a wider range of less common use cases.