How EV charging robots work

When most people think of EV charging, what comes to mind is a driver looking for a charging pile in a charging station. But what if the charging pile can look for the car instead? Well, that’s the whole idea behind EV charging robots, which eliminates the struggle of looking for an empty slot to refill your battery pack. Building charging stations isn’t cheap, so charging robots are being seen as a cost-effective way to optimize existing stations to make them handle more EVs at a time. Here’s what these charging robots are and the components that make them work.

 

What Is a Charging Robot?

EV charging robots are mobile platforms that can navigate autonomously to parked cars whose owners or drivers have ordered the charging service to refill their batteries. Once they get there, these autonomous mobile robots or automated guided vehicles extend their robotic arms to connect the charging cable to the car and begin transferring current from their onboard battery. Basically, charging robots are large power banks on wheels.

How Charging Robots Work

To understand how these robots work, we must list and define the functions of their primary components. These primary components include:

• A primary control board
• Cameras
• Lidar sensors
• Drive motors
• Battery pack
• Connectivity modules (4G or 5G)
• Display
• LED lights
• Speakers
• Wires

These components enable the droid to work by providing these features.

Navigation

Most of these charging robots are AMRs because they have to navigate around obstacles and other parked cars to get to the one that needs charging. So they have to move autonomously, which means cameras and lidar sensors are necessary. The former enables machine vision by providing a live camera feed to the onboard ML algorithm for object recognition and location determination. LED lights can be included to illuminate the path ahead and give the cameras better vision.
Advanced robots can have lidar sensors for more accurate obstacle detection and avoidance, especially in low-light conditions.

Control

The control system takes in data from the navigation system to alter parameters like speed when approaching obstacles, steering to avoid them, arm movement to plug in the charging pin, reversing after charge completion, and error checking in the robot’s control system.

Motion

Motion is closely tied to control as it involves spinning the wheels (motors) that move the robot from one place to another and braking.

Battery Storage and Charging

The primary function of a charging robot is to recharge EVs, so it must have a large battery to hold enough power to refill at least one car. Paired with this is a battery management system for monitoring the battery charge level to ensure optimal discharging when connected to the EV and optimal charging when connected to the charging station. However, some feature battery swapping technology, which leaves the charging optimization function at the station.

This battery should also be paired with a reliable power distribution network to send current to the EV and a charging system that communicates with the car to keep tabs on its charging level and status.

U/I

Charging droids must have screens to display real-time data about the charging status and alerts about faults for easy troubleshooting. This U/I feature should also be the avenue for accessing robot settings to adjust parameters like movement speed.

Connectivity

This feature enables wireless communication with external devices, such as your phone for payments, the charging station, and the EV to relay battery level information. The robot should also be able to alert admins of any issues wirelessly via the charging station for fixing in the shortest time possible. This connectivity can be via 4G or 5G to connect directly with the control center or BLE/Wi-Fi for communication via the charging pile/station.

User Feedback

Speakers and LED lights in the robot are used to provide feedback like beeping when charging is full and LED light blinking to indicate different error codes.

Conclusion

EV charging droids are becoming more popular in charging stations and will be a big part of the charging infrastructure in years to come. So if you want to get into this industry, you have a lot to gain because there are not many players currently providing this technology. But you need reliable suppliers to help you actualize the robots, and Wiringo can help you with this. Wiringo specializes in manufacturing and assembling custom cable assemblies, which the robot needs if you’re developing it from scratch. This cable manufacturer has been in this industry for over a decade and understands the requirements for making reliable cables for different parts of the droid, which include high-voltage wires for the battery pack and charging lines, flexible high-voltage wires for the charging arm, and interference-free RF communication cables Contact them to find out more about their robotics wiring harness manufacturing capabilities to get started on your project.