Design of Automatic Charging System for Electric Vehicles using Rigid-Flexible Manipulator

Last few years have seen a remarkable growth in the number of Electric Vehicle (EV) users. Autonomous driving and parking of EV s are the future of vehicle industry and this calls for customer friendly and innovative charging infrastructure de-velopment. A fully autonomous charging system highly aid them. This paper proposes the design of an automatic charging system for EVs. In this work YOLO (You Only Look Once) algorithm, a deep neural network based object detection algorithm is used to automatically recognize and locate the charging port of an EV. Thus accurate positioning of charging port in a complex environment can be achieved. A rigid-flexible manipulator on a movable platform is then designed for conductive charging of an EV automatically. Irrespective of vehicle models and charging ports the proposed design can be used for the automatic charging of EVs. The designed robotic manipulator successfully follows the path traced by the charging port detection system and perform plug-in process. The simulation results show the efficacy of the proposed design.