Parking, One of The Most Stressful Parts of Driving
We can all easily imagine how a peaceful evening after work can turn into a nightmare in the parking lot. Indeed, most of us have some sort of bad memory of wandering in the parking lot, raging against someone who parked their car in the wrong place, or doubting a neighbor about the scratch on our bumper.
According to recent research on parking disputes, almost one in five drivers get stressed due to a lack of parking spaces, and one out of four drivers have experienced a parking dispute. What’s worse is that, sometimes, we see actual cases that have escalated to physical violence.
Car Sizes are Growing
Parking is now a daily headache of drivers, as the size of some vehicles has overgrown for many parking bays that have remained unchanged since the 1970s.
Cars of today are more complicated than ever. The growing safety demand of customers and government requires more room for safety devices. Also, the cars of today are more packed with entertainment features to keep customers interested. All these devices occupy more space in a car and cause our vehicles to get bigger every year.
Comparing the vehicles on sale today to similar cars from 50 years ago, they have expanded by 25% overall, and some of them have grown by as much as 55%. Consumers prefer bigger cars such as SUVs and CUVs, and sales of these vehicles now account for over 70% of new vehicle sales.
Autonomous Driving Vehicles Save Parking Space
Research by the University of Toronto shows that autonomous driving vehicles are a solution for this parking space issue in the near future.
Autonomous driving vehicles will be able to drop drivers and passengers off before parking, so they can park themselves closely with little to no space needed for the door to open. Also, they save extra space for parking, as they can reduce the space needed for each car to drive out. Autonomous driving cars can also communicate with the surrounding cars to move out of the way and drive out.
The study found that a well-designed parking space for the autonomous driving vehicle can accommodate 62% more cars than a conventional one. In particular, it showed that a square-shaped parking lot designed for the autonomous driving vehicle can accommodate up to 87% more cars, and achieves more flexibility of utilization of space, as the cars can rearrange themselves to accommodate a larger number of vehicles.
Surround View Monitoring and Automated Parking Systems
Surround View Monitoring gives drivers visual cues to make them more informed and aware of their surroundings. But the application of deep learning-based vision processing technology to the feature enables more sophisticated services, such as Automatic Parking Assist (APA) and Autonomous Valet Parking (AVP).
APA assists in parking with or without driver’s intervention, and AVP provides complete valet parking service and a vehicle driving itself to the parking space, then coming back when summoned.
StradVision provides the perception software ‘SVNet’ that automotive OEMs can add to their SVM systems for these highly advanced features. ‘SVNet’ delivers the most efficient vision processing solution to our customers and partners with its biggest advantage of low consumption of computing power. It can be easily integrated into low-cost and low-performance processors like embedded SoCs while it enables superior adaptability for various parking environments worldwide through its proven deep-learning technology.
<Surround Vision Monitoring Demo>
Compatibility and expandability are other advantages of SVNet. It is compatible with more than 14 platforms and highly customizable for customer requirements. In particular, SVNet can offer an even stronger perception capability via the integration of inputs through multiple cameras, or various types of sensors such as Radar and Lidar.
StradVision is focusing on the advancement of SVM technology in 2021 and plans to collaborate with various OEMs, automotive parts suppliers and system-on-chip manufacturers to bring this SVM into day-to-day driving lives for everyone, leading the latest industry trends.