Perception and control strategies for autonomous docking for electric freight vehicles

The freight transportation is defined as the process of carrying goods and persons from one given point to another. Recently, urban freight transportations have been used as an alternative for the delivery problems of goods in urban environments. The present work is developed in the framework of the Furbot project (FP7), which presents a solution for future urban freight transports with new light-duty architecture, based on full-electrical vehicles. This paper is focused on the onboard intelligent units, dedicated to improve the perception and control systems for the parking/docking process. The results presented in this work will show the good behavior of our approach, which will be implemented in the FURBOT vehicle (www.furbot.com). (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.