Automatic Parking System
Multi-Sensor Information Ensemble-Based Parking Space Recognition
Parking space recognition, as the first step for automatic parking system, highly depends on the information collected by sensors such as ultrasonic or cameras. Multi-sensor information ensemble can improve recognition performance. The parking space consists of an upper edge and a lower one. Ultrasonic sensors, which are installed on the right-hand side of the vehicle, are used for edge detection. The installed ultrasonic model is LGCB1000-18GM-D1/D2-V15, and the detection range is 70−1000 mm. The mimic diagram of a parallel parking spot is shown in Figure 1.
A range including target parking space is obtained by ultrasonic sensors, and the image collected by sensors is smoothed by filtering. Thereafter, the distance between the upper and lower edges is measured, and also the displacement of the vehicle to the target parking spot. Subsequently, the data measured by the two sensors are fused through the data fusion algorithm proposed in this paper.
Parking spot detection is of great importance to parking space recognition. We design a parking spot detection algorithm consisting of ultrasonic range determination, edge detection, and spot length calculation, as shown in Figure 2. In this study, polling-driven mechanism is introduced to trigger the sensors, which means one of the sensors is firstly triggered to produce ultrasonic waves with a fixed cycle. If the echoes are received by the triggered one, then the system polls the next channel for the other sensor.
The process is repeated in cycles. Time of flight (ToF) is calculated by the time capture register of the micro control unit (MCU), and the measured distance is obtained as follows:
where at ; is the travel time.
Edge detection, which is crucial for the accuracy of parking spot detection, comprises upper edge detection and lower edge detection. In the case of parallel parking, the threshold of distance hop, which includes the hop threshold of the upper and lower edges, is calculated based on the threshold of the ultrasonic sensors and the cross rangebetween the target vehicle and parked vehicles, which is adjacent to the target parking spot. The threshold is determined by the width of the vehicle and maximum range of the ultrasonic sensor .
