Precision Data-Driven Collision Localization with a Dedicated Matrix Template for Electric Vehicle Automatic Charging

With the increasing maturity of autonomous driving technology and automated valet parking, public awareness of robot-based automatic charging for electric vehicles has gradually increased. The positioning of the charging port for electric vehicles is a prerequisite for achieving automatic charging. The common approach is to use visual methods for charging port positioning. However, due to factors such as external light conditions, humidity, and temperature, the visual system may experience insufficient positioning accuracy, leading to difficulties in executing the charging plug-in task. To address this issue, this paper proposes a data-driven collision localization method based on the vibration signal generated by the contact. During the data collection process, we first introduce a collision point matrix template suitable for automatic charging plug-in. This template covers the entire charging port and supports the acquisition of dense collision vibration data. Using this collision point matrix template, the collision localization problem can be transformed into a classification problem of collision vibration information corresponding to different collision points. Then, the collision vibration data obtained, based on this template, are used to train the collision localization model, which mainly consists of an echo state network (ESN) and support vector machine (SVM). The AUBO-i5 6-DOF articulated robot is employed to test the proposed collision localization method under different joint configurations. The simulated experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed collision localization method, showcasing a promising localization accuracy and root mean square error (RMSE).