Bringing vision-enabled smart charging to privately operated charging stations: Simplify charging experience – embedded vision for electric vehicle charging EV charging
The market for electric vehicles is growing steadily, and so the right infrastructure is needed to charge them. The vast majority of charging stations are privately owned - only ten percent of all stations are public. Private charging also includes other non-publicly accessible chargers, such as chargers reserved for the employees, fleets, or customers of certain establishments.
Framos, a leading global supplier of imaging products, custom vision solutions and OEM services, developed a demo to showcase that convenient, functionally safe, and hassle-free charging of electric vehicles is possible using automatic license plate recognition.
Framos implemented the demo on the basis of LF Energy project EVerest, the open source software and firmware stack for EV charging stations. EVerest, initiated by PIONIX in 2021, is a modular microservice and middleware architecture that supports all relevant EV charging communication protocols. For testing and developing purposes, PIONIX offers a reference platform, the BelayBox. It comes with EVerest pre-installed and pre-configured and is the perfect basis for implementing exciting ideas and projects, such as our demonstrator.
The demonstrator autonomously recognizes license plates through an embedded vision module and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) algorithms within a defined area. This information is compared with a white list of pre-registered number plates: If the license plate matches, the vehicle can be charged. If not, charging can be prevented.
The principle of “Park & Charge” leveraging embedded vision technology and ANPR also works in large, public parking lots with charging stations and can be used to make charging interaction-free and, therefore, convenient and functionally safe. If authorized vehicles are parked, they are charged. In the case of unauthorized vehicles, not only can the charging process be suspended, but warnings can also be issued to indicate whether a car has been parked without authorization.
The central point of interaction in the demo is the BelayBox. In real-life use, the BelayBox could be any EV charger running EVerest (or PIONIX BaseCamp, the commercial and maintained version of the open source stack EVerest. In private environments such as company parking spaces the EV charger communicates with a server backend from which it can be controlled. This gives charge point operators (CPO) full control and a profound overview of the charging stations.
In private home environments server and backend can be spared and all information can be stored on the charger. This makes our architecture an ideal starting point for building charging stations that benefit greatly from convenience functions and automation.
With such a system, fully automated charging processes for electric vehicles will be even easier in the future and will help to drive the electric vehicle revolution forward. Vision technology, embedded or otherwise, in combination with latest AI algorithms can also enable use cases beyond “Park & Charge”: Monitoring and analytics, personalized advertising or insurance policy designs to name a few.
We offer the full embedded vision module. Talk to us and our partner Framos to learn more about the EVerest CV module and the full capabilities of vision technology.
Framos at VISION 2024
Framos will showcase 'Park and Charge' powered by EVerest at VISION, the world’s leading trade fair for machine vision technology, taking place October 8 -10 in Stuttgart, Germany. Stop by at Framos' booth E54 in hall 10 to experience first hand.
