Conceptual Design of a Robotic Vehicle Refuelling System

Robotics has been hailed as a solution for repetitive, tedious, and dangerous physical activities. One such activity which has a need for robotics is Vehicle Refuelling. Automatic Vehicle Refuelling Systems have been developed by a few organisations and have also been described in patent and research literature. Most of these systems require radical changes in the design of the fuel tank of the vehicle or changes in the already existing refuelling station infrastructure. These challenges, along with technological barriers, made the adoption of such systems rare and difficult. In this paper we present two conceptual designs which do not have these limitations. Being a critical operation, we have designed for an independent safety check to preclude fuel spillage. An inbuilt option to shift to manual operation makes it an attractive candidate for implementation in existing fuel pumps.