Study on Automatic Electric Vehicle Charging Socket Detection Using ZED 2i Depth Sensor

Abstract

This article introduces the utilization of the ZED 2i depth sensor in a robot-based automatic electric vehicle charging application. The employment of a stereo depth sensor is a significant aspect in robotic applications, since it is both the initial and the fundamental step in a series of robotic operations, where the intent is to detect and extract the charging socket on the vehicle’s body surface. The ZED 2i depth sensor was utilized for scene recording with artificial illumination. Later, the socket detection and extraction were accomplished using both simple image processing and morphological operations in an object extraction algorithm with tilt angles and centroid coordinates determination of the charging socket itself. The aim was to use well-known, simple, and proven image processing techniques in the proposed method to ensure both reliable and smooth functioning of the robot’s vision system in an industrial environment. The experiments demonstrated that the deployed algorithm both extracts the charging socket and determines the slope angles and socket coordinates successfully under various depth assessment conditions, with a detection rate of 94%.