V-Charge

Short description

The V-Charge project has the vision of offering drivers increased comfort and greater road safety and providing additional impulses for the sale of future-oriented electric vehicles. To this purpose, a system is being developed that will allow users of electrically powered vehicles to park their cars at the edge of a parking garage or parking space and tell the system when they want to pick them up again and at what charge level. The car then drives automatically to a specific parking space in the area and/or - depending on the requirements - to a charging station. On the way there, dynamic and static barriers are detected and automatically avoided. When the owner returns, the car drives to the pick-up area where the user can get in and take control again. Since the availability of charging stations for electric vehicles is very important for their wider use, but installation and operation of stations is costly, it is necessary to manage these resources efficiently. This includes, for example, that charged vehicles clear the charging stations for the next vehicle as soon as possible and, if necessary, move to a regular parking space.
In order to realize this vision, on the one hand, an autonomously driving electric car is being developed that uses only low-priced standard components for the sensor technology, such as GPS, cameras or ultrasonic sensors. The car relieves the driver of various tasks and can thus provide greater safety. On the other hand, a server backend and a communication infrastructure are being developed, which will take over the efficient management of parking resources and the transmission of mission objectives and other information to the vehicle.

Research Partners

TU Braunschweig / NFF: Institute for Operating Systems and Computer Networks (IBR)

ETH Zurich: Autonomous Systems Lab (ETH-ASL), Computer Vision and Geometry Lab (ETHZ-CVG)

University of Oxford: Oxford Mobile Robotics Group (MRG)

Università degli Studi di Parma: VisLab

Industry partners

Volkswagen AG

Robert Bosch GmbH

Project Management Agency

EU FP7

Duration

06/2011 – 09/2015

 

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