Audi Free Parking Prediction System

When my wife and I go to spend the evening in San Francisco, I do not forget the address of the restaurant in the navigator. Instead, I find the nearest parking lot and use its address as a destination. This damn thing is easier than endlessly circling around blocks looking for a parking space.



But soon the navigator will be able to bring you just to the vacant place. Audi's Urban Intelligent Assist research project of Audi uses large amounts of data, wireless connectivity and car navigation for, among other things, the search for streets available for parking. Moreover, the system can predict when space will be made available for your car. It's like Google Now, but for parking.



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“A car is not just a vehicle from one point to another. This is our friend in a hostile environment, ”says Dr. Petros (Petros), director of the Center for Advanced Transport Technologies at the University of South Carolina. Researchers from the University of Berkeley, Michigan Transportation Research Institute and Audi Electronics Electronics Research Laboratory in Silicon Valley are also participating in the Audi project.



To transform your car into the above-mentioned friend, Audi has created a system of City Centralized Navigation for Drivers (Driver Centric Urban Navigation). Before the start of the demonstration, ERL Chief Engineer Mario Tippelhofer designates the AT & T landfill as the destination. To do this, he uses an Android smartphone, which runs an application developed in Audi that is related to the calendar and navigation system. A kind of diary equipped with GPS.



After the end point is assigned, the application requests information about the current road congestion and work history to the database. After that, determines that it will take about 7 minutes to get to the baseball stadium. If it was a business meeting, the application would warn me about the departure time and even set a safety time frame, for example, 5 minutes, so that I could arrive at the meeting a little earlier.



Sitting in the Audi A6, Tippelhofer puts the smartphone on a shelf in the center of the torpedo. For data exchange with the car navigator, NFC is used. This is not a requirement, you can use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. When information is transmitted to the car navigator, the route is displayed on its screen. On the streets surrounding the stadium there are a lot of control points. They display the number of free parking places in a given block.



How does the system know about it? Parking spaces located in 600 blocks of San Francisco and almost 700 blocks of Los Angeles are equipped with sensors connected to a central server, which receives real-time information about the employment of each parking space.







But the main thing is not this, but the fact that the system can predict when this or that place will become free. Based on the collected statistics, events and incidents nearby, the system predicts the number of free parking spaces by the time you arrive at your destination. Audi claims that the accuracy of the forecast is 97%, if your journey takes up to 10 minutes, and 91%, if you are 20 minutes away.



It really works. We parked in one of the three empty seats two blocks from the stadium. We leave the car, and the smartphone application tells us which way to go. And not just gives the names of streets, but gives commands in the style of "Turn right after McDonald's." For this program uses Google Maps and Street View.



The program can adapt to the driving style of the user. This happens quite quickly: during the demonstration, the system analyzed how I accelerate and slow down, what distance I keep, etc. This information is used to create a driver profile for more accurate calculation of arrival time, as well as to suggest more convenient parking places for you: in the garage, on the street or with the help of a parking attendant. The system can form your base profile after 15 minutes of driving, then within an hour it refines it and will constantly improve it later.



This profile, coupled with traffic information and dynamic route re-routing, allows the navigator to accurately predict your arrival time depending on traffic, speed of your movement, your reaction to events, where you park and how fast you can get from the car to the door of your destination.



Audi plans to introduce this system in a few years, so that as many cities as possible get traffic monitoring and parking systems, which will provide more accurate data for forecasting.