NITK students develop automatic car parking system

Nowadays, parking of cars in a parking area is becoming a difficult task as the number of vehicles are on the rise while the number of parking spaces are limited. As a result, people are forced to spend a certain amount of time looking for parking space and thus cause a situation where the traffic would be slowed down and cause congestion. Parallel parking has always been an incredibly difficult task for a shocking big number of drivers, especially for women, squeezing the car into such a tiny place could take up to several minutes. Sometimes, parking a car in a space is restricted by the driver’s skill at parallel parking. Fortunately, technology has provided a solution, that is, self parking of cars!
The technology helps a car that can identify a parking space and park on its own. The car drives down a street searching for a parking space to its sides using several distance sensors. When the car has identified a space, it checks to see whether that space is large enough to park in. If it determines that there is sufficient space, the car will begin parking into that space.

It uses information from sensors placed on the front, right, and rear of the car to direct the car into the parking space. Once the car was parked, it will remain in that position until it is reset. The same technology used in self parking cars can be used for collision avoidance systems and ultimately, self driving cars.

Recently, automotive vehicles are equipped with various intelligent functions. One of the noticeable functions is the parking assist system. This new technology was first introduced in 1992 by the Volkswagen Company. Self-parking cars currently on the market are not completely autonomous, but they do make parallel parking much easier.

 On the British Toyota Prius, there is a computer screen that shows the picture behind the car.  It will also show on the screen when to stop, put the car in reverse, and so forth.
A group of 3 M.Tech Mechatronics students Praveen, Venktesh Naik and Ajay Kumar of NITK Surathkal have found an answer for the new technology. The project was headed by Prof Narendranath of Mechanical Department.

The basic idea of the project was to power two motors using sensors and control system. Such control systems generally use microprocessors as controllers and have electrical sensors extracting information from the mechanical inputs and outputs via electrical actuators to mechanical systems. In this proposed project, three Infra Red sensors are used as inputs to the micro controller to control the two motors.

They have constructed this with locally available electronic components such as microcontroller and sensors. According to them, the cost for the prototype was around Rs 2,500 & the same for the actual electric car could cost around Rs 20,000.

Automatic car parking essentially involve finding the empty parking space and calculating the distance of the empty space. In the project infra-red distance sensors are used to determine the distance between the car and nearby objects and for detecting the obstacles.

These sensors use triangulation to compute the distance and/or presence of objects in the field of view. The basic idea is this is a pulse of IR light is emitted by the emitter. This light travels out in the field of view and either hits an object or just keeps on going. In the case of no object, the light is never reflected and the reading shows no object. If the light reflects off an object, it returns to the detector and creates a triangle between the point of reflection, the emitter, and the detector.

The microcontroller from Philips company was used in the automatic parking system project. Now the group is planning to implement the same to an actual electric car.