Ford works on technology that will help ease the frustration of searching for a parking spot
The frustration is undeniable. The search for a parking spot at the mall on a Saturday afternoon is time consuming and burns gas.
Imagine a technology that could eliminate all those wasted minutes. For people who live in the urban core, it would be as helpful as today’s smartphones.
“Those were our motivations,” David McCreadie, Ford’s manager of electric vehicle infrastructure and smart-grid technology, said in a telephone interview. “There have been studies conducted over the last number of years that tried to quantify just how big a problem parking is in the U.S.
“Whether it is going to a football game on Sunday or going to a mall during prime time, it is just a frustration a lot of us have to deal with on a daily basis, not to mention the environmental impact of it. It is a very real problem for drivers in the U.S. and drivers globally. This is something Ford believes it can do to help improve mobility and just the overall driving experience for our customers.”
Ford, in partnership with Georgia Tech, is working on technology that will make finding a parking spot easier, calling it the parking spotter.
In the last year, they have been running experiments, using existing technology in their vehicles to help ease the problem of searching for a parking spot.
The technology uses sensors that have already been built into the vehicles. The sensors, in the front and rear bumpers of the vehicle, emit ultrasonic waves that detect objects around the vehicle.
When that happens, the sensors can tell how far away an object is from a vehicle. These sensors have been on Ford vehicles for a number of years and are used for blind-spot detection, lane keeping or adaptive cruise controls.
“What we did with our project is we had to write some software behind the sensors that interpreted the signals that were coming off them,” McCreadie said. “The software we wrote was basically trying to define how large the parking spot was and was it truly a parking spot or not.
“Then we would send that message to a cloud and when the information gets (there), that is when the information becomes useful and usable for other people who might be using a parking app or something like that.”
Ford vehicles equipped with the sensing technology can be employed to detect open spaces as drivers look for parking spots.
“After you get done driving through the parking lot and mapping out the spot, the next person who is coming in, if they are getting a download from that cloud, would be able to see ahead of time if there were open parking spaces in that parking lot,” McCreadie said.
Other drivers will be alerted to available parking in the area of their request.
The parking spotter is still in the software development stage.
“What we built is purely for experiment purposes,” McCreadie said. “We are continuing to work this year because there are some other things with the system we need to refine and do some optimization.
“The point we are at now is it is not prime-time ready, yet, but we are certainly doing this with an eye to make it that way. The purpose of the project wasn’t just a science experiment; we recognize that parking is an issue. It is a serious issue economically because you waste gasoline driving around finding a parking space.”
In a Feb. 18 article for Green Car Congress, McCreadie added that they are working on adding in a probability factor.
“If a car drives by, and transmits data on an open space up to the cloud, will it be open 5 or 10 minutes later? What’s the probability that the spot is truly open? That’s part of the smarts that need to be built into this,” McCreadie said in the article. “There is a lot of data out there from which models can be built.”
Obviously, the more cars using the technology, the better it will be.
“If there is only a handful of Ford vehicles driving around major metropolitan areas, the benefit is not as great,” McCreadie said in the Green Car Congress article. “What we need are thousands of vehicles that are doing that. The best way to do that is to start to engage other automakers. Frankly, they have the same types of sensors in the front and rear fascia. They generally have similar hardware.”
Imagine how great it would be for the driver to have a better way to find an open parking spot much quicker.
“Wouldn’t it be great if vehicles themselves could be used as these mobile probes to find open parking spaces and make that information available to other users,” McCreadie said in the telephone interview. “It would be a very inexpensive way we think to solve the problem.”
More experiments are being conducted, such as how would it work in an underground garage.
“One of the test cases we are still experimenting on this year is how well will the sensors perform in different environments,” McCreadie said. “Stay tuned. We are working on that now.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2015 at 3:25 PM with the headline "Ford works on technology that will help ease the frustration of searching for a parking spot."