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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
Hyundai Motor Group recently partnered with South Korea’s Incheon International Airport to commercialize its robot EV charger.
The Automatic Charging Robot (ACR) uses deep-learning algorithms to locate your vehicle’s charge port.
Should the pilot program prove successful, Hyundai is looking to implement the solution globally.
Modern cars are capable of driving themselves as long as we keep an eye on them. Hyundai took this one step further by designing and building a robot to charge the car autonomously. And to us, it’s a potentially brilliant idea. But we have questions.
Having tested our fair share of electric vehicles, there’s already some assembly required once you get to a charging station. Fundamentally the charger needs to be compatible with your vehicle—and its socket. Once you’ve ticked that box, the charger must validate your vehicle to find out how much juice your vehicle can safely accept. It’s not exactly what we’d call straightforward. And that’s why Hyundai has thought of an automated solution to take the guesswork out of EV charging.
First Look
We should clarify that the “robot” in question is actually a hell of a lot less exciting than you might think. While we expected a humanoid butler, the reality is actually just a robotic arm that inserts the charging cable into your car. The technology is currently in its pilot phase at South Korea’s Incheon International Airport—pun fully intended—with a handful of charging stalls equipped with Hyundai’s Automatic Charging Robot (ACR).
It appears that Hyundai relied a bit too heavily on technology when crafting the press kit for the charger. The copy states that the ACR “relives inconvenience caused and anxieties about high arising from heavy connectors of existing EVs,” a sentence that sounds like it was dreamed up by a faulty AI program. For context, we included the brand’s full write-up below. Don’t believe us? Check the link.
Despite the nonsensical sentence, there’s still a discernible ethos: Take away all of the extra nonsense required to charge up your car.
How It Works
Parsing further through the press materials, Hyundai says its ACR will use deep learning to find your vehicle’s charging port. For context, the Korean automaker says its robot car currently delivers sub-1cm levels of precision for “minimization of charging port recognition error.” We don’t actually know what that means, but if it’s the overall precision of the system, engineering to the nearest centimeter isn’t what we’d call impressive. That being said, the ACR using deep learning to find the charging port implies it’ll narrow the margin of error in the near future.
We should note that the ACR is designed to flex and move with the car to stop the charger from being ripped out when the car moves. Outside of Hyundai’s solution for minor bumps and jolts, there are also safety concerns with having your EV locked down to a charger while you’re sitting stationary at a charging stall. One company, EV Eject, has recognized this potential problem, designing a quick disconnect for your electric vehicle—allowing it to break away safely from your vehicle if you have to escape.
What’s Next
While Hyundai’s next-level charging solution is a novel idea, we’re skeptical about its implementation. We wonder if the time and money spent on this technology would be better invested in eliminating the number of proprietary standards that we have for charging up electric vehicles. Tesla is one big innovator in this space, opening up its charging infrastructure to other all-electric automakers for a fee. And we view that as a tremendous step in the right direction.
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