Operation Strategy for Electric Vehicle Battery Swap Station Cluster Participating in Frequency Regulation Service

Idle batteries in the battery swap stations (BSSs) of electric vehicles (EVs) can be used as regulated power sources. Considering the battery swap service and the frequency regulation (FR) service, this paper establishes a model of BSS cluster participating in the FR service and formulates a two-stage operation strategy. The day-ahead strategy arranges the battery charging plan and FR plan with the goal of the optimal operating economy on the next day. The intra-day strategy aims at maximizing the satisfaction degree of battery swap, minimizing the loss of planned revenue and ensuring the coordination of battery swap service and FR service by regulating the charging and discharging status of each battery in real-time. The simulation case shows that, under the prerequisite of gratifying the battery swap demand, the strategy improves the operating economy by making full use of idle batteries which bear a part in the FR service.

UWB Base Station Cluster Localization for Unmanned Ground Vehicle Guidance

In this paper, we seek to provide unmanned ground vehicles with positioning service using ultrawideband (UWB) technology, a high-accuracy positioning approach. UWB is chosen for two distinct reasons. First, it does not rely on global navigation satellite systems like GPS, making it able to be applied indoors or in an environment where GPS signal is unstable. Second, it is immune to interference from other signals and accurate enough to guide unmanned ground vehicles moving precisely in a complex environment within a narrow road. In this paper, three UWB base stations are aggregated as a group in a 2D space for localization. A large number of tests are performed with a UWB base station cluster in order to validate its positioning performance. Based on the experiment results, we further develop a dynamic particle swarm optimization-based algorithm and a genetic algorithm to deploy multiple clusters of UWB base stations to cover an area of interest. The performance of the proposed algorithms has been tested through a series of simulations. Finally, experiments using unmanned ground vehicles are carried out to validate the localization performance. The results confirm that the robots can follow complex paths accurately with the proposed UWB-based positioning system.