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Linux-Powered Auto-Parking Car
megmag writes "A really cool project using a Linux P4 machine for automatic parking of a Volvo S60 was presented last week. Take a look at the video. That's how your parking problem should be solved. It is a final-year student project within the mechanical engineering department at Linköping University, Sweden."
it looks like cars are supposed to park perpendicular to the edge there, not parallel. But both existing cars were also marked parallel.
that is because the parking lot that it is in is a normal parking lot. hence the lines pointing the wrong way.
Here's a mirror of the 3.84MB video.
park.wmv
Jesus people, it's a fucking demonstration video. They aren't -cheating- with the lines, they just assumed it was so ridiculously obvious that they are SIMULATING the side of a city street that it wouldn't be necessary to make special mention of the different lines.
When I was in Germany, they'd fine you if you 'd let less than a meter between your park and the next so it might be the worst still legal situation in Sweden too.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
One of the students on the project is actually the kid of an old friend of mine. In case you're wondering, the Linux system they are using is a custom system based on the Gentoo-HA (High Availability) distribution. In addition to parking cars, the optimized P4 box is also allegedly used for many games of Quake. :)
Also, according to my friend, large quantities of pizza were consumed as an essential part of this project.
On the 0th day, God created C
This is exciting and all, but the Japanese version of the Toyota Prius already does this.
I was surprised to be able to download the vid at full speed, though. :)
:)
one reason would be that Linköping's University has a 2.5Gbit uplink to the 10Gbit backbone called SUNET, one of the (if not "the") fastest university networks in the world
I was going to spread some mod points around this topic, but I'll respond.
Both Honda and Chrysler are doing tests. On TV, I also saw an engineering school equip a Silhouette minivan with a computer that could drive the minivan. They did a test from the east coast to the west coast, and the car drove itself about 97.5% of the way across the country. A couple guys rode along in case, say, they encountered freshly paved areas with no lines on the road.
The minivan was equipped with color cameras and image recognition to find lines in the road, other vehicles and such. The main one was behind the rear-view mirror. It's harder because you can't use ultrasonic. They had to come up with algorithims to detect lines in the road. You'd need some method of differentiating flat yellow lines from a black background.
I am German, and I never got fined for having less than a meter between my car and the next one. I can't also remember such a regulation from my driving lessons.
What may happen is that if the car parking next to you can't get out of its parking space, then you could get a fine for blocking it.
Gee.. i dunno, perhaps because the parkinspace they tested this out on was layed out with perpendicular spaces instead of parallel, and they wanted to show how it worked with parallel parking space?
For instance, sample data to demonstrate a program: don't make it be something ridiculous and "funny", make it be something serious, and boring, and then your code will look it's best.
I'm a student at that university. Not at that department though so I don't know very much about the project.
However, I saw another demo that had a short explanation. It has three cameras on the side of the car that can spot a free slot. So, when you want to park you say that to the computer and then you drive slowly past the line of cars. When the computer finds a slot that it deems is large enough it tells you to get your hands/feet off the wheel and pedals. Then it proceeds to park.
It actually looked pretty userfriendly and nice. I don't know how small gaps it can manage though.
There is another video without the guy. http://www.ikp.liu.se/evolve/2004/filmer/Park_auto .wmv
Babelfish translation:
Hm, I think I can bo better than the fish...
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2) How does the system deal with engine/linkage issues. Cars don't provide smooth power/steering at all times. If the engine is out of tune or has a catchy throttle, can the system deal with that as well as/better than a human?
;)
The same way a human does it, feedback control. i.e. You measure your acceleration, and you adjust the throttle until you get the value you want. With the right control system, the computer should be able to do a better job than a person. This is actually a famous problem in controls, and has been much studied. I was a bit disappointed that the article talked more about the mechanics of interfacing with the car, but maybe they consider the controller a "solved problem"
3) How is it told where to park? It would have been nice if it was clear in the video what the driver did to tell it that. The article alludes to some sort of analysis system for this, but I like pretty pictures.
It looks like it just scans to the car's right for a space large enough to hold the car. It alerts you when it finds one, and you probably just hit a button to "go to most recent available space". Since this is a prototype, it probably doesn't have a very sophisticated UI.
Once the vehicles drive themselves, who cares? I've lost the ability to translate my high-level code into assembly language by hand, but I don't think I'll ever need to do that again, so I'm not losing sleep over it. If a particular driving skill is taken over (and done at least as well) by automation, then good riddance, the roads will probably be safer without a bunch of drunks and crazies weaving unpredictably back and forth.
Anyway, my guess is the first real self-driving will be on freeways, and people will still have to keep their driving skills up to snuff to get to the freeway and drive wherever they're going after they exit. I really doubt there'll be much degradation in driving skill if people are no longer forced to manually drive in a straight line for an hour with an occasional lane change to break the monotony. City street navigation is a much harder problem and I'm guessing it'll be a lot longer before we see it automated.
Toyota has already done this, at least according to Wired. In August 2003, they said a Prius hybrid would be released in Japan in a month that did this. I heard Honda was doing something similar, but haven't heard any details.
:)
Still, it's a cool project. Lots of drivers need all the help they can get.
I stand by my original post. You're essentially making the same statement as the parent did, and its just wrong.
Parking in a big space via Linux
is to
parking in the real world
what
downloading a 10K text file
is to
downloading Windows XP SP1.
Starting with one you'll eventually develop the capabilities needed for the other, but not by 5:00 today. It won't work as it, but its a reasonable start on the journey.
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
RTFA'd, saw the movies. Where does it say Linux?
:)
Nowhere, that's how I got to the conclusion that this story must have been submitted by one of my colleagues (am associated to that department, myself)...
As far as I remember, the computer controlling the electro-servo hydraulics actually *is* powered by Linux. I suppose it was RTLT, because the students and several of my colleagues did much modelling in Simulink.
Well, there is some more information available, but this year's students did not as equally good a job of documenting their project as the 2003 students (Swedish only, though)...
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