Development of a Proof of Concept for a Universal Vehicle-to-Robot Communication

The emerging field of Automotive Service Robots (ASR) deals with the automation of service tasks, e.g., charging, parking, maintaining, and cleaning vehicles. Nowadays, first ASRs communicate with specific hardware of the vehicle through an individually developed integrated communication device. However, scaling these solutions across ASR use cases, adaptations are necessary for each case individually. To avoid respective costs and development time, the communication should be standardized. In this paper, we outline the development of a first proof of concept for a universal vehicle-to-robot communication interface for the use case of automated charging. We developed a backend sending control commands to a dismounted charging flap actuator of a vehicle. We validated the capabilities of the proof of concept by automatically opening and closing the charging flap through backend commands sent from a smartphone. Furthermore, we propose recommendations which include the next steps for a fully integrated demonstrator containing a charging robot and a modified vehicle.