Re-Plannable Automated Parking System With a Standalone Around View Monitor for Narrow Parking Lots

Abstract

An automated parking system allows drivers to park cars free of stress and collisions in parking lots. Most commercial systems use ultrasonic sensors and require a scanning process to search for a vacant parking space between two adjacent vehicles. If automated parking fails, drivers must return to the initial position for further scanning or take the steering wheel to complete the remaining parking procedure. To improve such limitations, we propose a re-plannable automated parking system with a standalone around view monitor. The proposed system can constantly reflect several errors and risks of perception, positioning, and control in real-life situations, and then re-generate the parking path to improve the parking precision and avoid any collisions. To realize this automated parking system, we propose a new system architecture and introduce four core modules: environmental perception, precise positioning, parking path planning, and vehicle control. In our experiments, we evaluated the system in narrow parking lots with a perpendicular parking space defined as $2.1 \times 5.0$ m. The proposed system successfully performed reverse automated parking with a lateral error of 0.049 m, a longitudinal error of 0.249 m, and a heading error of 0.468°.