Taxis are used primarily in urban traffic. They don’t drive very fast in this traffic but they do have to brake and accelerate constantly. This makes them predestined for electric driving. But how are e-taxis supposed to fill up with electricity when they are constantly queuing up at stations or airports, continually inching forward gradually? Cable-bound charging columns are definitely not a feasible solution.
Wireless Charging in the Waiting Lane
The partners in the project "Taxi charging concept for public spaces” (TALAKO) see the future in inductive charging. The principle is already familiar from the electric toothbrush, for example: if the toothbrush is in the charging station, its battery is charged wirelessly. The electricity flows via coils, which are installed in both parts of the device. And this is exactly the goal for the taxis. Special underground charging plates are to be integrated at the taxi stand and the electric taxis (e-taxis) can position themselves above these plates. The taxis have a receiving plate on board. As soon as this receiving plate is located directly above a charging plate, the battery is charged inductively via the coil current between the plates.
In order to test the feasibility of this concept, a pilot plant for an inductive taxi charging station will be set up in Cologne as part of the project. The intention is to charge up to six vehicles there simultaneously, while the drivers are waiting for their customers.
The paluno working group “Networked Embedded Systems” is working on a solution in TALAKO so that the taxis can be positioned exactly over a charging plate. The team is developing a camera-based system that gives the taxi driver feedback on the accuracy of the position via an app. Initial tests for vehicle positioning are already underway (see the video below ). For this purpose, an artificial neural network was trained on different characteristics of a vehicle such as wheels, door handles, mirrors, and headlights. The relative position of the characteristics detected is used to calculate the spatial position of the vehicle. In order for the system to analyze several images per second even at high resolutions, the calculation is parallelized using a conventional GPU.
Wide-Ranging Project Consortium
TALAKO is being funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy for three years. Under the leadership of the Chair of General Business Administration and International Automotive Management at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), paluno is collaborating with the University of Wuppertal, the City of Cologne, the engineering service provider INTIS, RheinEnergie AG, the TaxiRuf (Cologne) taxi service, and the English vehicle manufacturer LEVC. LEVC is a pioneer in the field of electric taxis and produces the typical London black cabs—so black cabs could soon be on the road in Cologne as well, but in the quietly whirring electric variant.
Further Information:
