If you’ve ever tried charging your phone on a wireless charging mat only to realize after an hour that it never charged because it was just mildly misaligned, you’ll understand the frustration of car-makers who’ve been wanting to wirelessly charge EVs. You see, it’s sure easy to plug an EV into a charging port, but nobody really likes the effort of stepping out, finding a cable, plugging it in, and waiting for your car to charge. It’s a lot easier to just drive onto a wireless charging mat and have your car charged while it’s parked (and while you’re sitting comfortably inside).
The problem, however, is that alignment. Wireless charging is only efficient when the coils on the charger and the receiver align perfectly. Lose the alignment and the energy gets lost too, resulting in a battery that isn’t charged. The problem may be minor, but its implications are massive when you consider how large a car battery is (especially compared to your phone). The solution according to South Korean designer Lee Dong Ju is fairly simple – a robot that drives to your car and autonomously aligns the coils beneath your EV for efficient charging.
Designer: Lee Dong Ju
A winner of the Red Dot Award: Design Concept for the year 2024, EV.BUDDY is a sleek little autonomous robot that can drive around, sliding right under an EV with a low battery. The platform-shaped robot is slim enough to easily slip underneath any EV (no matter how little the ground tolerance), using a series of sensors to detect the wireless charging zone on the EV’s underside. Once it does so, the EV.BUDDY raises its coils upwards to ensure they come in contact with the car, and the charging process begins.
The EV.BUDDY houses its own battery, although given how slim it is, one wonders what the battery capacity would be. Instead of you stepping out and configuring anything, the EV.BUDDY drives up to your car on-demand and begins the charging process, no muss no fuss. Sure, it’s just a concept for now, but I’d imagine it would work rather well in the future, where you could just park your car at a Target or an IKEA or even at work and have the EV.BUDDY autonomously drive up to your car, initiate the charging protocol, and juice your car’s battery without you doing anything at all!
Once it’s done, the EV.BUDDY slides out and drives back to its own station, where its battery gets replenished so it can charge the next car.
