Bringing vision-enabled smart charging to privately operated charging stations: Simplify charging experience – embedded vision for electric vehicle charging ➡️ EV² charging
The market for electric vehicles is growing steadily, and so the right infrastructure is needed to charge them. The vast majority of charging stations are privately owned – only ten percent of all stations are public. Private charging also includes other non-publicly accessible chargers, such as chargers reserved for the employees, fleets, or customers of certain establishments (1). Our demonstrator shows that convenient, functionally safe, and hassle-free charging of electric vehicles is possible using automatic license plate recognition, the open-source software and firmware stack EVerest from Pionix, and the Pionix BelayBox charging reference platform.
Our demonstrator autonomously recognizes license plates through an embedded vision module and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) algorithms within a defined area. This information is compared with a whitelist of pre-registered number plates: If the license plate matches, the vehicle can be charged. If not, charging can be prevented.
We implemented the demo on the basis of LF Energy project EVerest (2), an open-source software and firmware stack for EV charging stations. EVerest, initiated by PIONIX (3) in 2021, is a modular microservice and middleware architecture that supports all relevant EV charging communication protocols. For testing and developing purposes, PIONIX offers a reference platform, the BelayBox (4). It comes with EVerest pre-installed and pre-configured and is the perfect basis for implementing exciting ideas and projects, such as our demonstrator.
The principle of park & charge leveraging embedded vision technology and ANPR also works in large, public parking lots with charging stations and can be used to make charging interaction-free and, therefore, convenient and functionally safe. If authorized vehicles are parked, they are charged. In the case of unauthorized vehicles, not only can the charging process be suspended, but warnings can also be issued to indicate whether a car has been parked without authorization.
The central point of interaction is the BelayBox from our partner Pionix. In private environments such as company parking spaces the BelayBox communicates with a server backend from which it can be controlled. This gives charge point operators (CPO) full control and a profound overview of the charging stations. In private home environments server and backend can be spared and all information can be stored on the BelayBox. This makes our architecture an ideal starting point for building charging stations that benefit greatly from convenience functions and automation.
With such a system, fully automated charging processes for electric vehicles will be even easier in the future and will help to drive the electric vehicle revolution forward. Vision technology, embedded or otherwise, in combination with latest AI algorithms can also enable use cases beyond plug & charge: Monitoring and analytics, personalized advertising or insurance policy designs to name a few.
We offer the full embedded vision module. Talk to us and our partner Pionix to learn more about the EVerest CV module and the full capabilities of vision technology.
Learn more about our solutions and capabilities and contact us: Custom Imaging & Custom Vision System | FRAMOS
