| Summary: | With the increasing popularity of electric vehicles, low level of automation for charging process has become one of the main factors restricting the development of electric vehicles. Recently, auto-charging robots which have the ability to transform manual process plugging charging plugs into charging ports to automatic plugging-unplugging operation have arisen. This paper presents a 4-DOF cable-driven auto-charging robot (CDACR) consisting of a 3-DOF cable-driven serial manipulator (CDSM) and a moving platform. In this design, the 3-DOF CDSM is actuated by six cables being routed through five disks fixed to the CDSM's rigid links. The end-effector of CDACR is a flexible plug that has the ability to withstand small elastic deformation. The control algorithm and the plugging-unplugging strategy were designed to respond to various parking situations with or without yaw error. This paper takes the lead in introducing the cable-driven robot into the field of automatic charging. Besides, through simulated charging experiments, the feasibility and effectiveness of using CDACR to realize auto-charging for electric vehicles has been demonstrated.
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