Autonomous multi-story navigation for valet parking

Abstract

Electric mobility combined with recent advances in autonomous driving provides a solution to the environmental and traffic challenges of the modern metropolis. In this work we present an innovative system that completely changes valet parking and the process of charging electric vehicles. The introduced system tackles the problem of precise and efficient autonomous navigation for vehicles in gps-denied environments like 3-D multi-story parking garages. In addition a robot is employed to autonomously charge the parked electric vehicles. We give insight into the concept and implementation of such a system, and evaluate it in real parking garages. We extensively tested the system in a real-world application, where a driver leaves the vehicle at the entry of a parking garage and the vehicle then performs the navigation and parking task on its own. Our test vehicle autonomously navigated more than 50 times from the entry of a parking garage to an assigned parking spot on the 6th floor and docked with the charging robot. The navigation system is precise, efficient and capable of running online in real-world scenarios.