Continental develops fully automatic loading robot

Together with the start-up Volterio, Continental Engineering Services is developing an intelligent charging robot designed to make electric vehicle charging easier and more convenient. Charging robots could revolutionize the charging of e-vehicles.

Continental's development and production service provider Continental Engineering Services (CES) and the start-up Volterio have now officially entered into a partnership for this purpose. CES meets all the necessary certification criteria of the automotive industry and will develop the first near-series systems of the jointly designed charging robot by mid-2022. Series production of the system is planned for 2024 and will take place in Germany.

The fully automated charging solution consists of two components: a unit on the underbody of the vehicle and a unit placed on the garage floor. As soon as the car is parked, the two components connect via a smart automatic system controlled, among other things, via ultra-wideband - ultra-wideband is a radio-based communication technology for short-range data transmission.

The car does not have to be parked accurately

The loading robot corrects up to 30 cm deviation from the ideal parking position. For this purpose, it is irrelevant at which angle a vehicle is positioned in relation to the floor unit. A tapered design of the physical connector between the ground and vehicle units allows any positioning orientation in a full 360-degree radius.

CES and Volterio had previously conducted parallel and independent research on similar robotic charging solutions. In the new cooperation, the two partners now complement each other, so that a solution that corresponds to everyday electric mobility will be developed quickly and made available to customers who are already concretely interested today.

The innovative charging solution will initially be made available for use in private households with a suitable output of 22 kW AC. The solution is retrofit, which means that it can also be retrofitted in existing model variants of vehicles. In a second step, a fast-charging solution that can be lowered into the ground is being developed for public spaces, for example in parking garages, service stations or on company premises with a charging capacity of more than 50 kW DC. This also includes corresponding variants for fleet management of commercial vehicles, for example.

The advantages of the automatic loading robot

• The energy flows via a physical connection, just like in conventional charging stations. The advantage is that hardly any energy is lost during energy refueling with the charging robot - in contrast to wireless inductive charging via a magnetic field. This makes this solution particularly sustainable and resource-saving.
• Charging using robot technology is very convenient. Unlike charging stations, users no longer have to worry about anything, including fiddling with dirty or rain-soaked charging cables in narrow garages. The charging process is completely automatic.
• Communication between the ground unit and the vehicle unit via ultra-wideband ensures that the vehicle and the charging robot approach each other with centimeter precision - so the user can park relatively casually, and the technology is forgiving of deviations.
• The system is uncomplicated and quick to install. For example, the floor unit can simply be placed on the garage floor or bolted to it.
• Future-proof technology: When vehicles drive fully automatically and park themselves in parking garages, automated charging solutions will have to become part of everyday automotive life.