• ETRI Journal
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.1220-1230
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• 2015

An autonomous valet parking (AVP) system is designed to locate a vacant parking space and park the vehicle in which it resides on behalf of the driver, once the driver has left the vehicle. In addition, the AVP is able to direct the vehicle to a location desired by the driver when requested. In this paper, for an AVP system, we introduce technology to recognize a parking space using image sensors. The proposed technology is mainly divided into three parts. First, spatial analysis is carried out using a height map that is based on dense motion stereo. Second, modelling of road markings is conducted using a probability map with a new salient-line feature extractor. Finally, parking space recognition is based on a Bayesian classifier. The experimental results show an execution time of up to 10 ms and a recognition rate of over 99%. Also, the performance and properties of the proposed technology were evaluated with a variety of data. Our algorithms, which are part of the proposed technology, are expected to apply to various research areas regarding autonomous vehicles, such as map generation, road marking recognition, localization, and environment recognition.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.968-978
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• 2014

Autonomous vehicle technology based on information technology and software will lead the automotive industry in the near future. Vehicle localization technology is a core expertise geared toward developing autonomous vehicles and will provide location information for control and decision. This paper proposes an effective vision-based localization technology to be applied to autonomous vehicles. In particular, the proposed technology makes use of numerical maps that are widely used in the field of geographic information systems and that have already been built in advance. Optimum vehicle ego-motion estimation and road marking feature extraction techniques are adopted and then combined by an extended Kalman filter and particle filter to make up the localization technology. The implementation results of this paper show remarkable results; namely, an 18 ms mean processing time and 10 cm location error. In addition, autonomous driving and parking are successfully completed with an unmanned vehicle within a $300m{\times}500m$ space.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.584-593
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• 2012

This paper introduces an AVP (Automated Valet Parking) system which applies an autonomous driving concept into the current PAS (Parking Assistant System). The present commercial PAS technology is limited into vehicle. It means vehicle only senses and controls by and for itself to assist the parking. Therefore, the present PAS is restricted to simple parking events. But AVP includes wider parking events and planning because it uses infra-sensor network as well as vehicle sensor. For the realization of AVP, the commercial steering system of a compact vehicle was modified into steer-by-wire structure and various sensors like LRF (Long Range Finder) and camera were installed in a parking area. And local & global server decides where and when the vehicle can go and park in the testing area after recognized the status of environment and vehicle from those sensors. GPS solution was used to validate the AVP performance. More various parking situations, vehicles and obstacles will be considered in the next research stages based on these results. And we expect this AVP solution with more intelligent vehicles can be applied in a big parking lot like a market, an amusement park, etc.