Section: New Results

Autonomous docking based on infrared system for electric vehicle charging in urban areas

Participants : Benjamin Lefaudeux, Joshué Pérez Rastelli, Fawzi Nashashibi.

One of the recent aims of the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is the reduction of air pollution, reducing the fuel consumption in urban areas and improving road security. To this purpose, electric vehicles are a good and high demanded alternative. Nowadays, some big cities are launching the first electric car-sharing projects to clear its traffic jam, as an alternative to the classic public transportation systems. However, there are still some problems related to energy storage, charging and autonomy to be solved. To tackle this problem in the context of the French project AMARE, IMARA has developed an autonomous docking system, based on an infrared camera embarked in a vehicle equipped with dedicated ADAS, and some infrared diodes installed in the infrastructure, for recharging the vehicle batteries in a street parking area. The results obtained show a good behavior of the implemented system, which is working in a real scenario in the city of Paris.

Different experiments, departing from different points, show a good behavior of the proposed systems. Both lateral and longitudinal errors are lower that the limits of the charging station. The controller used is easy and intuitive for tuning, and the gains can be adapted according of the different vehicles characteristics. This technology permits to assist to human drivers in the charging process of electric vehicles in cities.