Volkswagen to take lead in automated parking

Volkswagen has joined the stampede to develop and market self-parking systems as a prelude to a fully autonomous car.

Named 'V-Charge' – for 'Valet Charge' – VW's automated system will park your car (in a properly equipped facility) and handle the recharging of the car's battery. Not only that, it will autonomously drive the car to another conventional parking once the battery charging is concluded, leaving the bay available for other battery/electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles to make use of it.

It's clever, but remains dependent on future infrastructure to be installed within existing car park facilities. Despite that, Volkswagen aspires to technical leadership in the field of self-parking cars.

V-Charge is the result of Volkswagen's involvement with a European Union research project, which is projected to yield stronger returns in the USA, ironically, where valet parking is considered less a luxury, more a necessity. Volkswagen is one of six partners supporting the project, which is focused on a convenience factor, saving the driver time. Time is saved looking for a parking spot, and time is saved by the car recharging itself.

According to Volkswagen, the driver downloads a digital map on his or her smartphone. This is then relayed to the car and sorts out for the on-board navigation system where the car is located, where the nearest parking station is, and how to get there. Should the vehicle be a battery/electric vehicle, it will select a bay with a recharging unit to top up the battery. By means of cameras and ultrasonic sensors, the car can negotiate its way through 'mixed traffic' comprising other cars, pedestrians and cyclists.

The vehicle is retrieved from the parking station by the driver operating the V-Charge app again.

Joining Volkswagen in the project is the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, which is taking on the task of visual localisation, movement planning and vehicle control (Autonomous Systems Lab division), camera calibration, 3D reconstruction from images and obstacle detection (Computer Vision and Geometry Lab division).

The Braunschweig Technical University, another partner in the project, is working the bugs out of car park management and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication ('V2I'). Robert Bosch is developing the sensor technology, Parma University is the subject matter expert for object recognition and Oxford University is drawing up detailed maps of parking areas (semantic mapping concepts).

Volkswagen can point to a long history of autonomous motoring research, dating back to a Touareg test bed from 2005. Named 'Stanley', the Touareg was the prime element of a joint project run by Volkswagen and Stanford University in California. It won the Grand Challenge competition for robot vehicles in 2005. Two years later, a Passat named 'Junior' took out second place in the Urban Challenge for autonomous vehicles.

Volkswagen has continued its work in the study of autonomous motoring continuously since then, with V-Charge the latest development from Wolfsburg, but almost certainly not the last.