Future requirements for drastic reduction of CO2 production and energy consumption will lead to significant changes in the way we see mobility in the years to come. However, the automotive industry has identified significant barriers to the adoption of electric vehicles, including reduced driving range and greatly increased refueling times.Automated cars have the potential to reduce the environmental impact of driving, and increase the safety of motor vehicle travel. The current state-of-the-art in vehicle automation requires a suite of expensive sensors. While the cost of these sensors is decreasing, integrating them into electric cars will increase the price and represent another barrier to adoption.The V-Charge Project, funded by the European Commission, seeks to address these problems simultaneously by developing an electric automated car, outfitted with close-to-market sensors, which is able to automate valet parking and recharging for integration into a future transportation system. The final goal is the demonstration of a fully operational system including automated navigation and parking. This paper presents an overview of the V-Charge system, from the platform setup to the mapping, perception, and planning sub-systems.
Electric vehicles (EVs) still have relatively long and frequent charging cycles. Moreover, charging resources are typically limited and must therefore be used efficiently. The V-Charge project has the vision to provide a solution by combining autonomous valet parking with e-mobility, introducing improved parking and charging comfort. V-Charge proposes a solution for charging autonomous EVs in parking places and efficiently using scarce charging resources, thus simplifying the life of the customer and increasing the feasibility of EVs. For the management of parking lots and charging resources, V-Charge provides a server back end and a communication infrastructure. In this paper, we present our design of scheduling concepts for a coordinated charging strategy that is implemented by this back end. Through intensive simulations, we show that the V-Charge server is able to efficiently handle realistic parking volume and performs well in fulfilling customer requirements, e.g., energy demand for the next driving tasks. Moreover, we evaluate the suitability of various scheduling strategies in different usage scenarios. For the simulation setup, real-world parking statistics obtained from Hamburg Airport and the City of Braunschweig, Germany, are used.
Abstract-Vehicular ad hoc networks allow connected vehicles to exchange and share information in order to improve traffic efficiency and safety as well as to provide infotainment functions. In order to cope with the challenging network conditions of the vehicular domain (e.g., intermittent connectivity), a disruptiontolerant networking architecture is suitable. In contrast to pushbased communications (e.g, cooperative awareness messages) used in many proposed vehicular applications, we focus on a query-response model for requesting sensor information. Of particular interest to us is the question how vehicular queries can be efficiently routed to a destination area in such challenged environments, and, more importantly, how the response can be routed back to a moving query originator. We therefore present Breadcrumb Geocast Routing (BGR), a novel disruptiontolerant georouting protocol based on a trail of breadcrumbs left by the query originator. As an overlay protocol, BGR can be used on top of different georouting mechanisms, providing an efficient means to address moving originators. We study the influence of parameters, e.g., breadcrumb size and distance, and prove the effectiveness of the proposed solution in an extensive experimental evaluation, showing that BGR achieves significantly higher delivery rates compared to traditional geocast approaches, while avoiding up to 97 % of the traffic overhead of Epidemic and PRoPHET routing.
Electric vehicles must be easy to use to be accepted by customers and to be successful on the market. One important part of this is the need for comfortable charging and parking. Especially if the charging of a vehicle takes a certain amount of time, a good solution to simplify the life of the customer is necessary. The V-Charge project has the vision to provide a solution by combining autonomous valet parking with emobility, introducing improved parking and charging comfort to increase customer acceptance of electric vehicles. V-Charge proposes a solution for charging autonomous electric vehicles in parking places and efficiently using scarce charging resources. For the management of the overall system and the provided resources, a server back-end and a communication infrastructure are provided. In this paper, we present our design of a central server back-end that handles the assignment of free parking spots to autonomous electric vehicles and implements scheduling concepts for a coordinated charging strategy. A typical scenario of such a concept might be the automatic drop-off and recovery of a car in front of an airport terminal without taking care of parking or charging in person.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.