Up next in smart driverless cars: Automated parking

Intelligent cars of the future will be able to park on their own and know if parking areas are empty or reserved.

Autonomous car technologies are continuously improving as regards smart driving, and obstacle and stoplight detection, and more safety measures are being explored. You might probably be wondering what else smart cars can do, thinking that since driving is already automated, why not parking, too? You guessed it right, that feature is coming real soon.

The European Commission has funded a project dubbed Autopilot, under which automated valet parking is being tested in various places, such as Finland, via VTT Technical Research Centre's robot car named Marilyn.

Based on the published video about the test, Marilyn is seen to work with an app on a mobile device. According to VTT, the robot car uses Ultra Wideband technology for positioning and data transmission, and the app is what the driver uses to reserve and verify availability of a parking slot. The app is shown to be able to display what the parking lot looks like and the detected obstacles, before the car, guided safely by IoT tech, drives to the empty slot. Marilyn was successful indeed in parking itself during the test.

VTT is reportedly exploring relevant technologies for vehicle platooning and sharing, and better pedestrian detection.

With all these developments underway, importers looking forward to add driverless and "connected" electric cars to their automotive business can expect that models of the future will be fully automated in all driving modes.