Volkswagen built a robot that can find your electric car in a parking lot and charge it

Finding that one free charging spot in a parking garage can be a chore, but if Volkswagen’s new project catches on, the charging spot might come to you instead. 

On Thursday, the company announced a concept for a mobile charging robot that comes to electric cars and charges them on its own. 

The robot would be able to communicate with the car, open the charging socket flap and plug in with no human interaction. It’s fitted with cameras, laser scanners and ultrasonic sensor, which would allow it to move freely and go around obstacles.

The robot would haul a “mobile energy storage device” (a big battery on wheels with about 25kWh worth of energy content), jack it into the car, and then scuttle off onto its next task. When the charging is complete, the robot would collect the battery and take it back to a base charging station. 

Volkswagen envisions the robot’s primary use in parking garages and underground car parks. Depending on the parking area size, several of these robots could be employed at one parking lot. 

“With this, we are making almost every car park electric, without any complex individual infrastructural measures”, Mark Möller, Head of Development at Volkswagen Group Components, said in a statement. 

There’s no launch date for the robot, which is currently at prototype stage.