Robot fuel pump for robot cars

While autonomous or robotic cars are not quite ready yet for wide adoption, there is good evidence that Google's autonomous cars are safer than human drivers. In addition, Tesla’s current cars are going semiautonomous with a software update that will allow Model S drivers to take their hands off the wheel for a little while.

Tesla’s autonomous vision doesn’t seem to end there, however. The company introduced a prototype of an automatic recharging robot, which looks like a silver snake rising from the ground and connects with a waiting Tesla Model S automatically. You can see the company’s demonstration here on YouTube.

One of the interesting things about the setup is that the footprint of the robot is very small. The ground base station looks to be about 1ft², and the snake itself in its “dormant” state simply stands right up. This means that the installation of the device will not require a great deal of space, which in turn makes it much easier to deploy in a wide variety of areas.

Still, this is just a prototype design and will not be deployed for several years. What is clear about this is that it makes the use of all-electric fully autonomous vehicles much easier. Let’s say your self-driving car drops you off at the entrance to a building and then drives itself to find a parking spot, the robot car will then need a robot refueler to charge it when it is “at rest.” This kind of thing is fairly far in the future, of course, but this solid silver snake robot indicates that at least one company thinks that it will be here sooner rather than later.