Abstract
In some restricted urban parking environment, conventional automatic parking assist system (APAS) may not be applicable due to the dimension limitations of the parking lot. To handle these situations, a novel ASPS for four-wheel steering (4WS) vehicles is proposed in this paper. In the proposed novel APAS, the suitable parking space is first identified through low-cost ultrasonic sensors mounted around the vehicle. Then, depending on the vehicle initial position, various compact and smooth parking paths are generated. With the full utilization of the 4WS system, the proposed path planning algorithm can allow a larger initial parking area and generate simple 2 or 2 segments plus parking paths, which can be easily tracked by the 4WS vehicles. The proposed APAS for 4WS vehicles makes the automatic parking process in restricted spaces more efficient. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed APAS, a 4WS vehicle prototype is applied for validations through both simulation and experiment results.
