Research on application of industrial robots in automated fueling systems for small individual cars

Abstract

An automated fueling system for small individual vehicles, such as 4- and 7-passenger cars, is necessary in the modern life. Currently in the car market, in terms of the characteristics of the equipped fuel tanks, it can be divided into two main groups, including the vehicles using the traditional fuel tanks and the vehicles using the cap-less fuel tanks. For the vehicles using the traditional fuel tanks, the vehicle drivers need 4 steps to pump the gasoline. They are opening the outer lid of the body, opening the screw cap on the fuel tank, putting the pump nozzle into the fuel tank and making the fuel pump. For the vehicles using the cap-less fuel tank design, the manufacturers replace the traditional screw cap with the self-opening (close) lid mechanism when there is (without) the pump nozzle. So when operating the gasoline pump, there is no step to open the screw cap on the fuel tank. This new design was pioneered by American car manufacturers such as Ford and General Motor. This paper proposes a solution for the automatic fueling for the vehicles that have the fuel tank without the screw cap. The system is built based on an industrial robot that do the task replacing for the station officer. Firstly, a special tool is designed to help the robot to operate during the automatic fueling. Next, an image processing algorithm is applied to recognize the position of the fuel tank of the vehicles. After that, an automatic fueling algorithm is proposed so that the system can do fueling automatically. The proposed solution is verified by the experiments on the real model. The experimental results show that the proposed system can be used to position the nozzle into the fuel tank with the acceptable error