Autonomous, i.e., self-driving, vehicles, are approaching convergence with another automotive technology that is also rapidly maturing: electric vehicles. What’s the advantage of self-driving electric vehicles? Safer streets and cleaner cities.
Jonathan Levine, professor of urban planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan pointed out to me on the phone today that autonomous vehicles have to potential to greatly reduce the amount of traffic in urban areas. That’s because they will make the sharing of vehicles much easier. A self-driving car will be able to pick you up at your home or business, and then go pick up the next nearest passenger.
An electric self-driving car will also have to potential to recharge itself when needed, with the help of inductive charging technologies just beginning to enter service.
Joe Barrett, senior director of marketing at mobile phone chipmaking giant Qualcomm, filled me in today on a project emerging from his company: Halo.
Halo was a University of Aukland spinoff that was acquired by Qualcomm a couple of years ago for wireless electric vehicle charging.
With Halo, a charging pad embedded in pavement throws off a magnetic field that interacts with a pad in the underside of a car parked above it. Barrett says the system has demonstrated greater than 90% efficiency in transferring energy from the pad to the vehicle in a process known as induction. The same underlying technology is commonly used to charge electric toothbrushes. Qualcomm has been licensing the technology to automakers and is working toward so-called dynamic charging, where cars can recharge on the go, simply by driving over pads embedded in roads.
Barrett described his company’s vision of autonomous electric vehicles thusly:
“If you imagine your electric vehicle, you may drive it most of the time, but then when you get out of the car at work, you want it to go and park itself. But then it’s going to have to park and charge itself, so the charging bay will have to be wireless because the car cannot plug itself in. So in that situation, you will need wireless charging. In the same way if you have car share. You may sit at home. You want to order a car share. The car will drive itself to you. You will get in it, you will go to your destination, you will get out, and you will send it away. Again [it] will need to go and find a wireless charging bay to charge up because, again, it can’t plug itself in.”
Barrett says we can expect to see wirelessly charged electric vehicles in production in 2017.
Wireless charging is neat, but this seems a bit silly: “the charging bay will have to be wireless because the car cannot plug itself in”
Robot vacuum cleaners plug themselves in. Machine vision has made big advances over the last few years to the point that it can be bought in an off the shelf, inexpensive item like the Pixy. If the car can drive itself then it park accurately enough for an automatic wall charger to grapple it. Even at 90% transmission efficiency it doesn’t take that many charges for it to have been worth getting 100%.
Wireless charging works on the basis of induction. All AC circuits produces an alternating emf field around them. You could pick up power from that field up by a secondary coil. Japan already has its bus service with wireless charging. Search on Youtube for Japan wireless bus and Nicola Tesla’s wireless power. There is a lot of resources its good technology.
I am not too sure about this technology, this is a nice innovation but it will take time and research to reach its full potential. With this post I get the glimpse of future cars. Thanks for sharing.
Have a design for a self charging automobile, coast to coast, border to border & not one ounce of fossil fuel needed, not one kilowatt of plugged electricity needed, able to travel on its own recharging system as well as adding no pollutants to our planet. Obama, as well as Al Gore were sent copies of my design under protection of the “poor man’s patient”, I received letters from both offices for showing an interest in the automobile industry & protecting the ozone layer. No further progress, to my knowledge, has been applied to my design. Probably mess with world economics not depending on fossil fuels. Thx, Hunter
My idea of a self charging car is based on the principle that if you expend energy, you can retrieve either all or some of it as the car travels on. First, the car could have solar cells on the roof and/or hood. Then, as the wheels turn, generators on each wheel could generate electricity and charge the batteries in transit. The use of the wind force caused by the car traveling forward could be used in the following way: The car traveling at 60 miles an hour, for instance, would produce a 60 mile an hour wind force that could be funneled through metal ducts of some size. As the air funnels through the ducts, a series of small generators.
installed inside the ducts, would also generate electricity to charge the batteries in transit. The ducts could be installed under the hood on both sides of the engine, or maybe, if needed, placed on the roof, with as many ducts as needed. Lastly, the use of the brakes to generate electricity could also be used, a technology already in use.