- Rocsys’ new charging robot can plug in a robotaxi without needing a human.
- The company’s first-of-its-kind solution is brand-agnostic, meaning that it could be used across virtually any charger or EV.
- Its robot boasts an impressive 99.9% plug-in success rate.
Whether you like it or not, the robotaxis are coming. And all those self-driving cabs will need to charge up somewhere, somehow, and potentially without human assistance.
That’s where startups like Rocsys come into play. Rocsys built what it says is the first hands-free, multi-bay robotaxi charging solution in the world, it announced on Wednesday. It’s a completely automated charging robot that glides atop a row of chargers and uses a robotic mechanism to start and stop the charging process. Let’s talk about how this works, because it’s actually pretty cool.
The core of the system is a large robotic arm that rides across a rail system. The rail is erected over the charging area and can be expanded if a fleet expands its infrastructure to include more stalls at a later time. One system can serve up to 10 parking spots, the company says.
Once the robotaxi parks, the carriage finds the car, drops the robotic arm out from above, then removes the charger from the cradle before slotting it into the car’s charge port.
The company says that it’s not locked into a single vendor, either, and that mixed-fleets and various types of EV charging hardware are a non-issue for the robot. Rocsys’ demonstration even shows the that the robot can manually pop open the charging-port door in cases where that isn’t motorized.
Photo by: Rocsys
Rocsys says that its automated charging robot has a 99.9% plug-in success rate. It also claims that a 50-bay depot could achieve a productivity increase of up to 75% and annual cost savings of around $1.7 million per year if installed in a 50-bay robotaxi depot.
Looking back over a decade ago, Tesla tried to come up with a similar solution for charging. CEO Elon Musk described it as a “solid metal snake,” but it wasn’t something that ever made it to market (even though Musk brought it up again five years later). A lot has changed in 11 years, though, including exploring the idea of wireless charging to solve this very same need. Tesla has said that the purpose-built Cybercab will use inductive charging exclusively.
While more autonomous cars are getting deployed by the day from players like Waymo, operating them still requires humans. People watch over robotaxis remotely and help out when they get stuck. They also handle fleet management tasks like cleaning and charging—at least for now. And while Rocsys’ system might solve the problem of a human plugging in a charger, it doesn’t solve every little problem.
For example, someone might spill a bag of chips in the back seat, or maybe they forget a backpack. Or an extreme case might be picking up passengers after a long night at the bar might mean that someone is stuck scrubbing the carpet. Maybe we’ll see a robotic solution for that soon enough, too.
