Volkswagen demonstrates Valet Charging

You know the drill. The panic starts to rise in your throat as the time ticks away, then you arrive at the airport only to lose another 10 minutes circling to find a park.

Volkswagen thinkers know the drill better than most, because they work in Wolfsburg and regularly commute to airports in different cities like Hamburg.

Things would be easier though if you could just drive to the departures area, take out your bags and leave your car to find its own park.

That’s what Volkswagen has done with its Valet Charging system, or V-Charge, which was demonstrated with a host of new technology stuffed into a Golf 7 at Amsterdam’s giant Schiphol airport.

It brings autonomous driving in a bundle with the ability to charge an electric car without getting your hands dirty. What’s not to like?

As demonstrated by VW, the driver of an electrically-powered Golf simply drove it into the multi-story car park, stepped out, pushed a button on a smartphone app and walked away.

Then the Golf turned on its hazard lights and did a slow, 10km/h lap of the car park, stopped for pedestrians and other cars coming out of their own parks, and made a beeline for two dedicated electric charging parks.

It turned into the park and stopped itself directly above an inductive charging plate, then switched off as the metal plate lifted itself close to the underside of the car. But the technology doesn’t stop there.

When it was fully charged, the Valet Charging Golf reversed out of the park and headed off to a normal parking space, freeing up the charger for the next electric car that needed it.

Developed as a project with help from Bosch, the European Union and universities from Zurich in Switzerland, Parma in Italy, Oxford in England and Braunschweig in Germany, it’s a decade away from production, Volkswagen developer Martin Kunke estimated.

“Broad use of inductive charging is probably only five years away,” he said, “And it takes a little longer to charge inductively, but if you are flying away in a plane that should not be a problem, should it?

“Induction charging needs the car above it to have 10-15cm of tolerance around the ideal point before it works, but the Valet Charging system has 1-2cm of tolerance.

“The inductive efficiency is 90 per cent if the battery is closer to the plate, so it uses a Z-movement to lift the plate towards the underside of the car. We just want to make sure that the power moves from the primary cell into the induction coil.”

But that’s not the only way the car can be charged. Volkswagen also has a robot that can communicate with the car, open its fuel flap, connect the right cable plug, charge the car, then pull the plug out and close the flap when it’s charged.

“The process begins with a communication between the charging post and the car to exchange information,” Kunke explained.

“It has a camera to determine the exact position of the socket in the car then it will insert it and it will stop. It has torque sensors, so it stops moving when it’s touched, which is why it does not need to have a safety cage or anything around it.

“Because it’s based on the connectivity between the car and the robot, the robot always knows what kind of car it is [some cars have the socket in the fuel flap and some have it in the front or the rear or in the grille] and what kind of cable it needs.

“The robot might also be suspended or able to move around to different parking positions.”

Given the convenience of having a car that relieves its driver of the time-sponging drudgery of circling car parks and even refueling, you might think that would be clever enough on its own, but apparently you’d be wrong.

That’s because Kunke is thinking Hive. The level of the car park used by Volkswagen had somewhere north of 200 parks in it and had been mapped by a digital mapping company, but it might not always be that way.

For starters, the Valet Charging car uses a lot of the Golf’s optional sensor technology to do a lot of its own mapping anyway, constantly calibrating its whereabouts against the map.

The big step, in Kunke’s vision, is to use not just the Golf’s sensors to create and update maps by itself, but to use all Volkswagens to do it with hive or swarm data.

“That’s the other possibility: that we can use all Volkswagens or even all Volkswagen Group models out there to send the data to us to create the maps,” Kunke envisioned.

“It also means we can stay up to date faster if there are changes, like road works. That way we can create new maps as we go, and it’s cheaper for us and for customers than using mapping companies to do it.”

That kind of thinking might be visionary and an astonishingly low-cost way to map cities, much less car parks, but it runs foul of EU privacy legislation and Volkswagen owners would have to sign over some rights to allow it to happen.

Otherwise, anybody wanting an autonomous or semi-autonomous Volkswagen will have to pay for mapping and mapping updates.

“We believe this is the right technology for the future and we have companies involved to deliver the digital maps.

“The map can be transmitted to the car wirelessly and it will learn the surroundings as it sees them.

“Yes, there are vacuum cleaners that do it themselves with randomised algorithms and they bump into things to cover as much area as possible. We obviously can’t do that.

“The car at the moment works with maps and then sources its own local information. We just need four points of data, but it will always have 400 coming to it from its sensors, so if there is a shadow or something over a line that’s not there on the map, the controlling program would just not use that data.”

The surprising thing about the idea of using the world’s Volkswagen fleets to map their own roads is how little it could cost, if Kunke’s calculations are correct.

It took the car two hours to fully map the car park Volkswagen used for its demonstration, but Kunke explained that using a fleet of Volkswagens would not only be faster, but would confirm accuracy and instantly distribute changes to all other connected Volkswagens.

“We are focusing on the sensors that are already optional in the car to keep costs down and speed up production possibilities. We need them and 360-degree coverage because we have a wide variation with turning angles and the car has to go backwards, too.

“We use the fisheye and ultrasonic sensors that are on the market already. Then for more range we use the front stereo camera systems that already read traffic signs.

“It uses the cameras and sensors to identify landmarks with data, which has already been transmitted to the car. It also uses ultrasound to detect other cars and people and the production car can stop by itself in front of obstacles in mixed traffic now.

“Other than that, we need some capacity with the server but with LTE and WiFi, it’s available, so it’s just about the protocols and we need a safe connection between the app and the car so it can’t be hacked or hijacked.

“But if you are talking about the components, we are just about done and it could be in a conventional vehicle that would just need the sensors and an automatic gearbox.”

There are other systems in development to help cars find their own way around car parks, but Kunke thinks the system his project is developing is faster, cheaper and less complex.

“Some systems rely heavily on the infrastructure. They rely on lasers and things to tell the car where to be.

“We think that’s high investment for infrastructure and then you need some of it in the car. We are using the intelligence that we have in the car anyway due to the driver assistance systems.”

Now that’s almost covered, Kunke and the universities need to start work on the car that cleans and vacuums itself while it’s parked.