Realizing Autonomous Valet Parking with automotive grade sensors

The availability of several Advanced Driver Assistance Systems has put a correspondingly large number of inexpensive, yet capable sensors on production vehicles. By combining this reality with expertise from the DARPA Grand and Urban Challenges in building autonomous driving platforms, we were able to design and develop an Autonomous Valet Parking (AVP) system on a 2006 Volkwagen Passat Wagon TDI using automotive grade sensors. AVP provides the driver with both convenience and safety benefits-the driver can leave the vehicle at the entrance of a parking garage, allowing the vehicle to navigate the structure, find a spot, and park itself. By leveraging existing software modules from the DARPA Urban Challenge, our efforts focused on developing a parking spot detector, a localization system that did not use GPS, and a back-in parking planner. This paper focuses on describing the design and development of the last two modules.