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Self-parking Car Automated Obstacle Avoidance
Self-parking Car New Scientist has just published a new article entitled Self-parking Car Just Around the Corner. For the moment, it can only tell you if the parking space is big enough -- but I guess that's not really an issue if you can't get into it! In the future, they hope to have automated obstacle avoidance take care of the parking to avoid those nasty bumps and scratches. You'll also have the option of leaving it on during normal driving, so the car prevents you from running over pedestrians... that could be annoying if you're driving in a foreign country! There's a part of Paris that would really benefit from this technology. Apparently there it's best to park your car without the handbrake or a gear engaged, since other people squeeze into spots even if the car doesn't fit! True story. But I guess the earliest iterations of this technology would be just as entertaining to watch ;) | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Tuesday 30 October, 05:25 Reply
Car parking... This is solvable using an A* search, so long as the car can generate a search space representing its surroundings. I've done it in simulation, the hard part is generating the real world map to do the work in. And it sounds like they've done most of that already... | codemonkey_uk 8 posts. Thursday 29 November, 11:27 Reply
Obstacle-Avoidance rather than Path-Planning I think they basically let the driver find the parking spot, and use the distance sensors to do the manoevering. I'd be very amazed if it was any more than that! A* is over-rated ;) | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Friday 30 November, 10:36 Reply
Parallel Park Well I was assuming they where doing something more complex than just automatically backing the a car into a space - that's just a question of not hitting things. Think of the component movements involved in getting into or out of a parallel park position, or performing a three point turn. It can be useful to think of this as a route finding problem, in the same way as solving a rubix cube, or docking a spaceship can be thought of as "route finding" problems. I wasn't talking about "finding a space to park", rather how to park in a tight space using several small movements. | codemonkey_uk 8 posts. Monday 03 December, 07:19 Reply
Indeed Yeah, I was disapointed too... but hey, one step at a time! Indeed, route finding problem would be much harder. To some extent, it's already been done at a high-level, with GPS-based guiding systems. But this does not apply to lower-level details. I guess a blend of the two approaches sounds like the way forward. Hmmm, sounds a lot like the research I'm doing ;) | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Tuesday 04 December, 07:07 Reply