Design of a Cable-Driven Auto-Charging Robot for Electric Vehicles

With the increasing popularity of electric vehicles, low level of automation for charging process has become one of the main factors restricting the development of electric vehicles. Recently, auto-charging robots which have the ability to transform manual process plugging charging plugs into charging ports to automatic plugging-unplugging operation have arisen. This paper presents a 4-DOF cable-driven auto-charging robot (CDACR) consisting of a 3-DOF cable-driven serial manipulator (CDSM) and a moving platform. In this design, the 3-DOF CDSM is actuated by six cables being routed through five disks fixed to the CDSM's rigid links. The end-effector of CDACR is a flexible plug that has the ability to withstand small elastic deformation. The control algorithm and the plugging-unplugging strategy were designed to respond to various parking situations with or without yaw error. This paper takes the lead in introducing the cable-driven robot into the field of automatic charging. Besides, through simulated charging experiments, the feasibility and effectiveness of using CDACR to realize auto-charging for electric vehicles has been demonstrated.