Audi showcases its Intelligent Automatic Parking system in Barcelona

I think I’ve mentioned this to you before, but I’ll never tire of repeating that I don’t like autonomous vehicles or similar systems at all, and I suppose any lover of the motoring world and driving will think the same. Inevitably the path ahead is that one, letting the machine do all the work and us taking a back seat. An example of this is advances such as the Autopilot system of Tesla.

But Tesla is not the only brand making advances of this kind, since, as you well know, for several years now we have seen many brands incorporating parking assistance systems, for example, something that many people who aren’t good at these manoeuvres have found a godsend. These systems are not present on every model on the market, but it is true that they are becoming increasingly common.

At Audi they have been working for several years on autonomous parking, such as the Audi Piloted Driving, a system that, using WLAN wireless guidance, is capable of finding a free parking space and, via the car’s own remote control, with just the press of a button the car will drive itself to the free space, park, and switch off automatically. The same operation in reverse, and our car will be waiting for us at the exit of the car park.

Right now Audi is at the Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS for short) being held in Barcelona, presenting its Intelligent Automatic Parking system. With this system the brand with the four rings aims to show how a car can develop intelligent parking strategies.

To do this, they use a 1:8 scale model of the Audi Q2 which has a self-learning system, which they place in a 3×3 metre area where the car autonomously searches for a suitable parking space. To do this they use two individual cameras facing forwards and backwards, plus ten other ultrasonic sensors installed at strategic points on the car. Thus an onboard computer converts the data it receives from the sensors into precise movements for the steering and the electric motor, while at the same time fixing its position relative to the parking space and carrying out the manoeuvres it deems appropriate.

Up to this point everything may seem normal compared with what we already have today, but this small Audi Q2 is capable of learning on its own from the trials and errors it makes when parking, all thanks to an algorithm that identifies the actions carried out successfully. In this way, the system is able to autonomously solve the problems that may arise when parking, regardless of their difficulty.

For the moment Audi confirms that trials for this project are in the pre-development phase, but they will not be long in installing it in a real model and starting parking tests in real car parking spaces.

Source | Audi