Add this to self-driving cars, and you have IVES: Inter-Vehicular Energy Sharing. Cars capable of topping each other up while on the freeway.
Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
171–180 of 209 posts
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#172Why do they want me to enter my email address to continue reading? I had to delete 3 HTML nodes to get past their "drawbridge"... Here's the gif for anyone who doesn't want to deal with the (totally useless) article: https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/files/2015/0...
Adblocks, popup blockers, and my custom filters still aren't able to make news article websites usable, so I just don't even try anymore.
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
That could probably be made to work today, with the gear used by container cranes to slot containers onto ships, trucks, and railroad cars. It would be more complicated than the snake, because stabilizing a hanging load is hard. Once in a while it would probably scratch the car body. What a lot of people here aren't getting is that snake robots are mechanically simple. They're unusual, but neither complex nor expensi…
Would the claw still work if it was coated in soft rubber? Alternately, I'm imagining the cute-but-ridiculous solution of making the claw and the car magnetically repel one another, so as it the claw plumb-bobs downward and swings toward the car, it just sort of naturally veers away from the surface, rocking around it in an arc until it stabilizes.
T-600s were covered in rubber - turned out people could spot them easily, so they were poor infiltrators.
Tesla should consider covering these with living tissue to make them more palatable to humans.
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems completely, extravagantly unnecessary, but that's much like many other qualities of Tesla cars I guess. Is it really too much work to plug in a charging lead by hand?
Imagine you pull up to a Supercharger on Friday night of a holiday weekend. All the stalls are taken and there is a line of a handful of cars in front of you. Today, you wait in your car until the people in front of you finish charging. Tomorrow, you leave your car in line and go get dinner.
Apart from the coolness of it, I think this is the main actual use-case.
As the cars get more autonomous, being able to initialize charging robotically (either in a supercharger-queue, or when the car parks itself at home) is useful.
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#175Can you imagine how pets are going to react to this? A real-world use-case involves this in a garage, and you pull into the garage (or tell the car to) and it parks and then this snake starts its dance and finds the chargeport and connects and starts charging... and your dog goes completely ape-shit. And barks and shrieks and jumps and snaps its teeth and gets a nice vise-grip with the snake in its jaws and next thin…
Well, that escalated quickly
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
The huge benefit will be when this is used in conjunction with the self parking system. You drive up to the front of your house, get out, and the car drives itself into the garage and plugs itself in.
I completely agree. I came here to say this but see you beat me to it! I might add that this could be used to park your car miles from where you live. You would simply let your car know when to pick you up and it would come to you like calling the valet at a hotel before heading out. If tesla had overnight parking garages/chargers scattered around we could use all that garage space in our houses for more activities!
I'd always seen electric vehicles and fully autonomous vehicles as synergistic technologies for this reason. Certainly, in the part of town where I live, no one has garages or even driveways, so electric cars as they stand would not be practical here.
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
The snake arm is quite simple. The "snake" part is a set of dumb hinged segments; it's all cable-driven from the base. The application does not require much rigidity or repeatability. The load is low; it's just carrying a power cable. There's probably a camera at the end of the tentacle to guide the connector to the car's power socket. The car opens the connector cover, so there's no need for a mechanism on the robot…
> The marketing value of this is enormous. People won't have to get out of their cars and get their hands dirty handling a gas hose. This is going to go over big with women. I think you're underestimating the benefit here. From my talks with Tesla owners, some of the Supercharger stations are pretty far out in the middle of nowhere (for coverage, they have to be). Late night charging in a rural area without a lot of…
How long does the recharge take? Are people really going to sit in their cars for 30 minutes?
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
The huge benefit will be when this is used in conjunction with the self parking system. You drive up to the front of your house, get out, and the car drives itself into the garage and plugs itself in.
I completely agree. I came here to say this but see you beat me to it! I might add that this could be used to park your car miles from where you live. You would simply let your car know when to pick you up and it would come to you like calling the valet at a hotel before heading out. If tesla had overnight parking garages/chargers scattered around we could use all that garage space in our houses for more activities!
That's a really interesting thought once you consider where autonomous vehicles are going with Uber and Google's self-driving vehicles.
It makes a ton of sense that any such vehicle, in addition to going to pick you up, drive you around and drop you off needs to be able to park itself at home base and refuel in an automated fashion.
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or allow you charge-up without really doing anything. Stay inside your car and read at the supercharger station!
Or, cars become a shared resource and you just call up basically a driverless Uber when you need it. That's the future I want to see in e.g. areas where mass-transit is blocked politically (e.g. BART from SF to SJ) or where the population density is such where it doesn't make sense.
Imagine your robo-tentacle in drab safety black-and-yellow, have a hundred of them waving in the dark waiting for their JohnnyCabs to come in for a charge between fares...
Re: Tesla unveils new car-charging robo-snake
#180Definitely a PR move to compete with the simultaneous hacking story.
..which is odd, because the hacking stories are suggesting "everybody gets hacked", and Tesla are the only ones with the capability to do an OTA security fix (which they have done).