What we have here is a very promising joint pilot project, started by Daimler, Bosch and car2go, meant to revolutionize the way we park our cars.
Naturally, you control everything via your smartphone, which you then use to tell your car to go find a free parking spot by itself and of course, to come pick you up when you’re ready to drive off again.
Everything is dependent on an intelligent infrastructure in the car park itself, the Bosch vehicle control unit as well as the new-gen Mercedes-Benz on-board sensors.
Prof.Dr. Thomas Weber explains how their customers are “always the centre of attention and all of our actions are oriented towards them. In future the car will even go to them. In collaboration with our partner Bosch and our mobility service car2go we are developing and testing an infrastructure-based solution for a fully automated valet parking service. For us another step on our way to autonomous driving – or as in this case: towards autonomous parking.”
According to Bosch board member Dr. Dirk Hoheisel, “fully automated parking will be ready for mass-production before fully automated driving,” which does indeed make a lot of sense since the infrastructure for automated parking would be nowhere near as complex as the one you’d need for fully autonomous driving.
The way this works is that the car park’s intelligent system registers a vehicle, starts it and directs it to an assigned parking space. The necessary infrastructure for all of this is currently being developed by Bosch, and it includes parking space occupancy sensors, cameras as well as the communication tech.
Furthermore, Bosch will account for the communication unit inside the vehicle, which also happens to control the parking process. Daimler then has to adjust the sensor systems and “voilà”, no more wasting time struggling to find a spot while you’re running late.
The applications for this technology are indeed numerous, and we can’t wait to see it in action in the near future.
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