Ultra-Wideband Aided Precision Parking for Wireless Power Transfer to Electric Vehicles in Real Life Scenarios

Ultra-wideband wireless positioning technologies based on IEEE 802.15.4a have gained attention for various use cases requiring highly precise localization. In this paper an ultra-wideband based approach is proposed and validated for a vehicular use case requiring highly precise local positioning in a dedicated parking lot. For efficient power transfer in wireless charging of electric vehicles scenarios, an accurate alignment of the coils of vehicle and ground is essential. The specific challenge addressed in this paper is that the proposed approach achieves the required lateral accuracy with only two ground- based anchor nodes in combination with one vehicle-based node. For the in-depth validation of the proposed system concept, two experiments are performed: the first one is conducted with an electrical vehicle representing a real park-to-charge-case, whereas the second experiment is executed in a controlled environment to allow for further alignment error analysis. The experiments show, that an error lower than 10cm can be achieved.