Brussels, 01/08/2014 (Agence Europe) - The EU has invested €5.6 million in a fully automated parking and charging system for electric cars at public car parks, which will be available in a few years, the European Commission announced on Thursday 31 July.
Only a few minutes to go before your flight check-in closes, or before your train leaves, but you are still looking for a free space in the airport or station car park? Imagine being able to leave your vehicle at the main entrance and let it do the parking on its own, thanks to an autonomous parking system. Researchers from Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are currently working on making this happen, and successful trials were carried out at Stuttgart airport earlier this year.
In the future, more and more people will drive electric cars and will switch from one mode of transport to another, creating the need for more and varied parking options at transport hubs. To prepare for this mobility shift, the V-CHARGE consortium is working on a fully-automated parking and charging system for electric cars at public car parks.
“The idea is that we can actually use technology to give people a better mix of public and private transport”, explains Dr Paul Furgale, scientific project manager for V-CHARGE and deputy director of the autonomous systems lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
Drivers will be able to leave their cars at the car park entrance and use a smartphone app to trigger the parking process. The vehicle will connect with the car park's server and drive itself to the designated space. In under-cover car parks, it can also be programmed to go to a charging station. Upon their return, drivers just use the same mobile app to summon the car, fully charged and ready to go.
Since GPS satellite signals do not always work inside garages, the scientists have developed a camera-based system based on their expertise in robotics and environment sensing. Safety is at the centre of the project, meaning that the system has been designed to avoid unexpected obstacles. Dr Furgale believes that the same technology could be used to develop autonomous parking systems for electric cars on city streets: “That will be more of a challenge. But once you have the maps in place, the rest of the technology will come together”.
A system to be integrated into production. In April of this year, the team successfully presented the latest version of the system at Stuttgart airport. The researchers are now fine-tuning the technology to tackle more precise manoeuvres and ensure reliability, even in difficult weather conditions.
The project is set to conclude in 2015, and its results available to be progressively commercialised in the coming years. The functions developped should be cost-effective enough to be integrated into the production of electric vehicles. Engineers are working with equipment that is already available, such as ultrasonic sensors and stereo cameras that are used in parking assistance in emergency braking systems.
V-CHARGE comes under the EU's investment programme in the field of robotics. To allow the EU to keep its leading role in the strategic area, the European Commission launched a public-private partnership worth €2.8 billion in June 2014, called SPARC, which will receive funding under the new EU research and innovation programme, Horizon 2020. (LC)