If you’ve ever attempted charging your phone with a wireless charging mat only to find out after an hour that it hadn’t charged because it was just slightly misaligned, you’d totally get the frustration of car-makers looking to implement wireless charging for EVs. Sure, it’s easy to plug an EV into a charging port, but who really likes stepping out, hunting for a cable, connecting it, and waiting for the car to charge? Imagine the convenience of just driving onto a wireless charging mat and letting your car get powered up while you relax inside!
The issue, though, is all about alignment. Wireless charging works best when the coils in the charger and the receiver are perfectly aligned. If they’re not, the energy is wasted, and the battery won’t charge. This might seem like a minor inconvenience, but it has huge consequences, especially considering how big car batteries are compared to those tiny phone batteries. South Korean designer Lee Dong Ju proposes a pretty neat solution – a robot that autonomously drives over to your car and aligns the coils underneath your EV for effective charging.
Designer: Lee Dong Ju
This innovative EV.BUDDY is a winner of the Red Dot Award: Design Concept 2024, and it’s a sleek autonomous little robot that can zoom around, sliding neatly under an EV with a low battery. The platform-shaped robot is designed slim enough to fit under any EV, irrespective of its ground clearance, using multiple sensors to locate the wireless charging area on the vehicle’s underside. Once it zones in, the EV.BUDDY lifts its coils and lines them up with the car’s, starting the charging.
The EV.BUDDY has its own battery, but given its sleek design, people might wonder just how much battery capacity it can hold. No more stepping outside or fiddling with cords, the EV.BUDDY comes to your car on-demand and gets started with the charging hassle-free. Although it’s only a concept right now, it’s easy to envision a future where you simply park at places like Target, IKEA, or even your workplace, and the EV.BUDDY autonomously comes by, kicks off the charging process, and recharges your car’s battery without any effort needed from you!
After it’s finished, the EV.BUDDY smoothly drives back to its station to recharge its own battery for another charging session.
