Abstract
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.
Highlights
Electric propulsion systems in mobile industrial applications have a long tradition and can be found in multifarious types of use
A specific challenge for successful operation represented the development of a highly-accurate position detection and object matching process
The matching process is based on a vision-based algorithm, using a CAD-model of the specific connector surface shape for processing in the vision software Halcon [20]
Summary
Electric propulsion systems in mobile industrial applications have a long tradition and can be found in multifarious types of use. Used company- and vehicle type-specific charging sockets come with the disadvantage of non-universal applicability and these systems are not certified for general use In this context, it is a target of research and development activities to provide a universally applicable fully-automated charging solution that makes use of a robust and standardized charging interface. Even for manually driven vehicles, the use of automated charging has a great potential to support safe operation and efficient processes In this context, the present publication introduces results of a research project, which was focused on the development of a fully-automated charging system for a broad range of applications [5]
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