EU project V-Charge makes final demonstration of automated valet-parking and inductive charging system

EU project V-Charge makes final demonstration of automated valet-parking and inductive charging system

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. . . The fully automated parking system relieves drivers of the tiresome and time-consuming task of finding a parking spot. The vehicle not only automatically looks for an empty parking space, but finds an empty space with charging infrastructure and inductively charges its battery. Once the charging process is finished, it automatically frees up the charging bay for another electric vehicle and looks for a conventional parking space. . . .

The project envisions a world in which travelers complete most interurban journeys using a long-distance transportation network and then switch to comfortable electric vehicles for the last few miles from the railway station or airport to the destination.

V-Charge enables the traveller to drop his or her vehicle off at the entrance of the parking lot, handing over the search for a charging station and parking spot to the system. Picking up the vehicle at the end of the day is as easy as dropping it off—the vehicle awaits the traveller at the entrance, fully charged and ready for the onward journey.

This new mobility concept requires fully automated driving in designated parking lot areas. However, the V-Charge project sets itself apart from other automated parking concepts by enabling co-existence of manual and automated traffic while utilizing a close-to-market sensor setup and placing only minimal infrastructure requirements on the parking lot.

The cameras and ultrasonic sensors required for the vehicle to perceive and navigate in its environment are already available in many series production cars. Localization within the parking lot does not require any artificial markers nor any structural modifications due to the usage of solely natural visual landmarks. This increases the attractiveness for both managers and end-users of the parking lot due to substantial savings in both time and cost.

Cameras and ultrasonic sensors are arranged for 360° coverage of the surroundings. After connecting to a remote parking lot server, the vehicle receives a specially designed map for localization, and road-network information for the parking lot. The localization map stores visual information of all the places in the parking lot, enabling the vehicle to determine its position with respect to the map using its camera images.

This technology does not rely on a GPS sensor, thus allowing navigation in indoor environments such as underground parking spaces where GPS is not available, and was perfected to provide centimeter-level accuracy.

In the background, the parking lot server computes a time schedule for the vehicle based on the requested drop-off and pickup times, making the most efficient use of a potentially limited number of charging stations by prioritizing imminent pickups. . . .

On its way to the designated parking spot or charging bay, the vehicle is constantly using its onboard sensors to monitor its local surroundings for static obstacles and other road users, and seamlessly integrates with them in traffic. The system automatically distinguishes between vehicles and pedestrians and accounts for their differing movement patterns.

With the final demonstration in Amsterdam, the V-Charge team showed that automated valet parking can be realized with a contemporary, close-to-market sensor setup. Work remains to be done to achieve higher levels of automation in the mapping processes and enable multiple automated vehicles to constantly contribute data to keep maps up to date. Allowing the system to learn behaviors of other road users and improve navigation over time will further promote smooth integration into everyday mixed-traffic operation. . . .

The technical prerequisites enabling the system largely already exist. During the introductory stage, it was possible to utilize sensor and camera technologies that are already being used in today’s production vehicles. A dense network of sensory devices enables autonomous operation of the V-Charge test vehicle, which is based on a Volkswagen e-Golf.

Four wide-angle cameras and two 3D cameras, twelve ultrasound sensors, digital maps and the Car2X technology for the vehicle’s communication with the infrastructure ensure that the vehicle’s surroundings are reliably detected and recognized. Pedestrians, vehicles and obstacles get identified, parking spaces recognised and measured and then this stream of data is put together in real time to form an overall picture.

As continual tests run as part of the research project show, V-Charge is already functional today. GPS-independent indoor localization, centimeter-exact parking space measurement and 360-degree recognition of surroundings all function reliably, as do the system’s reactions to pedestrians and vehicles and the way in which it takes account of traffic moving in line with or across the vehicle’s path.

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