A new era of automated EV car charging may be just around the corner following an innovation from Volkswagen which will see an army of charging robots patrol car parks.
The German company has unveiled the self-driving robots which can be called via an app or through the connected-car software and will find your vehicle using cameras, laser scanners and ultrasonic sensors.
When fully charged each robot will carry around 25kWh of energy each and returns to a base station once fully charged.
“The mobile charging robot will spark a revolution when it comes to charging in different parking facilities, such as multistorey car parks, parking spaces and underground car parks because we bring the charging infrastructure to the car and not the other way around,” said Mark Möller, head of Development at Volkswagen Group Components.
“With this, we are making almost every car park electric, without any complex individual infrastructural measures. It’s a visionary prototype, which can be made into reality quite quickly, if the general conditions are right.”
The charging robots come with a happy face though, as no human interaction, other than hailing the charger, there is no need for human help.
“Even the well-known problem of a charging station being blocked by another vehicle will no longer exist with our concept,’ Möller continued. “You simply choose any parking space as usual. You can leave the rest to our electronic helper.”