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Comment by brianshaler | Hacker News Reader

If the Supercharger stations are on private property, it seems like Tesla could legally activate self-driving "Summon" functionality to move fully-charged Teslas to nearby parking spaces. The only real challenge would be safely unplugging the cable without damage to the car, which is relatively trivial compared to the self-driving technology they've already built.

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Tesla has a video of an automated "snake" cable on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI

And here's the Marvin Gaye version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiY5XNNzFQ8

And the infamous "don't drop anything when you're near it" comment by Elon (https://youtu.be/gV6hP9wpMW8?t=1m25s)

That's not over-engineered at all.

That thing has always seemed so needlessly overcomplex to me. Not that I work at Tesla, I'm sure there are reasons for it. But do they extend beyond "because it looks cool"?

Surely a robotic arm with 3 joints would suffice?

Ultimately the 'charging station' is going to become a socket on the wall that is a beefier version of what you might plug a kettle into. Some people with posh garages might have these fancy snake things but everyone else will be getting some charging lead and plugging it in.

I can imagine it becoming a viable business to dig up a whole street and to install sockets for every space on both sides of the road, for electricity to be sold and parking charged for. We have seen this with the roads being dug up for fibre broadband.

What I don't ever imagine is the street outside my house ever having snake style robot arms every few yards, sockets I could imagine and I could imagine some gold rush where the streets get dug up to cash in on some electric car boom, even before electric cars are ubiquitous. With cable we had the streets dug up for relatively few takers, but in time, with broadband, everyone became dependent on that service.

you have to consider self-driving cars. the car might go somewhere without a human to plug it in. that's where the snake may come into play.

That's a good mechanical design. Flexible robots like that are cable-driven from the base. All the expensive parts are in the base, where they can be protected. The motors and gear trains don't have to be lightweight. This reduces cost and improves ruggedness.

The arm just has cable guides and the wiring for the plug. There's probably a $10 cell phone camera and a light source near the end, for zeroing in on the power socket. That eliminates the need for high precision positioning. There are no exposed joints, so the whole thing can be encased in a flexible covering for weather protection. If you put springs in the cables, the tentacle will deflect if bumped without damage.

Flexible robots like that have been used industrially, but the low precision and problems with cable wear have been a problem. For the power plug application, neither is a problem - final positioning is camera controlled, and the mechanism operates maybe once an hour in busy locations.

Tesla should have deployed this by now. Something about that thing seems to upset people, though.

Robotic gas station pumps have been built using more common robot technologies.[1][2] They're big, complicated, expensive, and commercial flops.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YV79YcSvYQ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qALPymP1f6Y

Not that difficult, the plug in the car could have an ejection mechanism(just pushing slowly the cable, nothing fancy) and then you move the car away to a parking slot with autosummon. The cable just needs to be installed from a taller post that avoids it being dragged by the floor when released. If done like this doesn't need really high tech on top of summon.

It's funny that the problem of a self driving car that can move itself out of the way into a free parking spot is solved but we are worried that unplugging a power cord thing might be too hard...

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