A German Parking Garage Parks Your Car For You

moon_unit2 writes "Tech Review has a story about a garage in Ingolstadt, Germany, where the cars park themselves. The garage is an experiment set up by Audi to explore ways that autonomous technology might practically be introduced; most of the sensor technology is built into the garage and relayed to the cars rather than inside the cars themselves. It seems that carmakers see the technology progressing in a slightly different way to Google, with its fleet of self-driving Prius. From the piece: 'It's actually going to take a while before you get a really, fully autonomous car,' says Annie Lien, a senior engineer at the Electronics Research Lab, a shared facility for Audi, Volkswagen, and other Volkswagen Group brands in Belmont, California, near Silicon Valley. 'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'"

Comments

Self Parking

[nschubach]

While it's a neat idea for a self parking garage. I saw a concept(?) previously where you drive your car into a "single car container" and when you left, your car in it's container would be shuttled off to a compact/secure storage array like a tape in a server room storage rack. Even though it requires more track and sensors, that system seems to be more realistic than a system that requires every car be programmed to understand the signals being broadcast by the garage.

Re:Sheesh

[Bigby]

It is rather short-sighted and pessimistic for him to say. The technology is already there. The only things holding it back are intricate details and liability concerns. The latter being the bigger issue.

Re:How does the insurance industry feel about this

[xelah]

How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.

By insuring car makers against crashes caused by their software. And, of course, it's not the rates they care about, but the profit....they may be able to maintain their profit whilst reducing rates by paying out less and getting rid of administrative overhead by dealing with a few big customers.

Fahrvergnügen

[0100010001010011]

The Germans love driving. They love driving fast. I can see why it is set up so that "the first self-driving vehicles will perform only specific tasks." To numerous of them driving isn't just something to get from point A to point B. Which is why most German cars didn't have cupholders, etc that American cars did back in the 80s.

I was recently working in Germany and a coworker mentioned that some lawmakers want to put a speed limit but there is heavy, heavy resistance funded in part by VAG and Benz. He likened it to America's gun culture. and with that analogy some of the stuff some of our gun rights advocates say makes sense to them. (Not all of it, some of it is crazy rhetoric.) You don't touch Germans' driving/cars and you don't touch Americans' guns.

Self Parking isn't new

[Anonymous Coward]

wikipedia says:

The earliest use of an APS was in Paris, France in 1905 at the Garage Rue de Ponthieu.[2] The APS consisted of a groundbreaking[2] multi-story concrete structure with an internal elevator to transport cars to upper levels where attendants parked the cars.[3]

In the 1920s, a Ferris wheel-like APS (for cars rather than people) called a paternoster system became popular as it could park eight cars in the ground space normally used for parking two cars.[3] Mechanically simple with a small footprint, the paternoster was easy to use in many places, including inside buildings. At the same time, Kent Automatic Garages was installing APS with capacities exceeding more than a 1,000 cars.

APS saw a spurt of interest in the U.S. in the late 1940s and 1950s with the Bowser, Pigeon Hole and Roto Park systems.[2] In 1957, 74 Bowser, Pigeon Hole systems were installed,[2] and some of these systems remain in operation. However, interest in APS in the U.S. waned due to frequent mechanical problems and long waiting times for patrons to retrieve their cars.[4] Interest in APS in the U.S. was renewed in the 1990s, and there are 25 major current and planned APS projects (representing nearly 6,000 parking spaces) in 2012.[5]

While interest in the APS in the U.S. languished until the 1990s,[2] Europe, Asia and Central America had been installing more technically advanced APS since the 1970s.[3] In the early 1990s, nearly 40,000 parking spaces were being built annually using the paternoster APS in Japan.[3] In 2012, there are an estimated 1.6 million APS parking spaces in Japan.[2]

The ever-increasing scarcity of available urban land (urbanization) and increase of the number of cars in use (motorization) have combined with sustainability and other quality-of-life issues[2][6] to renew interest in APS as alternatives to multi-story parking garages, on-street parking and parking lots.[2]

Another article is here.

Re:Life Safety Critical

[stenvar]

It's only "very, very hard" because people have an inflated sense of safety when a human is in charge. People can regularly cause accidents, but a single error by a machine will threaten the entire technology.

Re:How does the insurance industry feel about this

[tgd]

How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.

Charging people at a risk level that has substantially dropped? They'll be pissing their pants in excitement. The reduction in risk turns directly into profit.

Perhaps we need a 3rd type of licence

[zacherynuk]

Manual : Those that can drive a real car
Automatic : Those that can drive a real car but don't understand how it works
And Self-Drive : Those that should have taken the train; and should not be allowed on the road without all of their assists.

Obviously the latter fits in with the two former; modern driving aids like auto park, lane detection, radar follow and brake - even ABS and ESP mean that really, if that's all you have ever driven, you should not simply be allowed on the streets, with me and my kids in anything 'manual' - IMVHO

Re:Perhaps we need a 3rd type of licence

[jewens]

When a semi-automatic can shift gear in 50ms...

Clearly they need to be banned or at least restricted to require the driver has to swap gearboxes every 5 shifts. Anyone who needs to shift more than 5 times must be up to no good.

Re:Life Safety Critical

[Anonymous Coward]

Life safety critical autonomy is very, very hard.

Perfection is hard, but beating a human operator is not. Humans constantly crash vehicles, but we just accept it as a matter of course.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/06/mbta-driver-crash-held-second-full-time-job-with-bha/4M66jdB3J0HCnx2DwEwt7K/story.html

How fucking had is it to design a system that prevents two electric trolleys from colliding? It's really fucking easy. Wire it up so drawing a load from any two adjacent blocks trips the circuit breaker for the block in the back. It's a practically bulletproof design-- get too close to the train in front and you lose power. Humans...even humans with "a decade of experience and a perfect safety record" really suck at this stuff.

The REALLY hard part about autonomous vehicles is that they eliminate jobs in the short term. Go tell the Teamsters that $75/hr truck drivers aren't needed in this world, and then go run for office.

Re:Sheesh

[gutnor]

10 years is the time it takes to bring a technology that is fully available now to mass production. Nothing to do with optimism or not, it takes several years to design and produce an incremental upgrade on existing cars.

Just have a look at electric car and a modern company like Tesla. They announced their first car in 2006. Produced it in 2008, upgrade it to something slightly more usable by Joe User in 2012. If they keep it up at the same rhythm they could maybe have a real mass production (i.e. with the problem of the masses fixed) model in 2016. 10 years.

Same thing here, you will get more and more automated car (there are car that park themselves, and can drive on the highway available now), but for a mass market, robotic taxi, 10 years does not seem so pessimistic.

Hit submit by accident...

[Firethorn]

If GM or other major car companies ends up assuming additional liability for each car they sell, I'd expect them to largely self-insure. Then again, utilizing existing insurance channels might be for the best.

I would NOT be surprised to see a legislative bill that indemnifies manufacturers of a autonomous car and puts the onus on the owner/operator, or even a switch to 'no fault' type insurance, in order to encourage them, so long as they test as being safer than average human drivers to a high confidence level, probably using DUI convicts as test beds.

Given a reasonably self driving car, I see a shift away from breath testers for driving to 'you can only take self-driving cars for X years', even if the system costs $40k. Just the breath system is like $10k for the first year, what with all the maintenance required, going by the road signs declaring 'YOUR FIRST DUI CAN COST $X', with breakdowns. Add in the thousands probably saved in insurance, etc... It adds up.

Re:Uh-huh.

[wcrowe]

Last summer I was in New England. A buddy and I were driving down the interstate and I wanted to stop at a pharmacy and get some antacids. We had the GPS unit find the nearest pharmacy and it began directing us to a CVS just two miles away. The unit kept telling us that we were getting closer, but I didn't see any exits. Just before we crossed an overpass the GPS announced, "Your destination is on the right." Sure enough, I looked down and there was the CVS -- forty feet below us.

I have often wondered how a driverless car would handle that situation.

Re:Sheesh

[lennier1]

The topic probably would've made more sense if the bullshit summary had actually contained a video of the experimental system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfgn6evkMpw

Automatic parking, of course

[Animats]

Back in my DARPA Grand Challenge days, I saw fully automated parking as the first "killer app" for automated driving. Everybody was obsessed with automated freeway driving, but that's not what annoys people. Looking for parking annoys people. The general idea is that you get out of your car at your destination, and it goes and parks itself somewhere. When you want your car back, you call it and it comes to you. Parking then need not be as close to the destination; a big parking garage a mile away is fine.

The first application of this should have been for airport rental cars. You rent the car via your phone, and the car comes to the loading area near baggage claim and picks you up. When you're done with the car and at the airport, you get out at the departure area, and it drives itself to rental car return. Customers would save an hour on every plane trip. That would sell.

It's workable. At no time is autonomous operation above about 20MPH necessary, which means slamming on the brakes is sufficient to deal with most problems. All the rental cars are new and under common ownership and maintenance, so the self-driving systems can be checked out on every rental. The system could be expanded to include the top 10 destinations for rental cars - major hotels, convention centers, etc.

After 9/11, no way would autonomous vehicles be allowed in an airport terminal area. So that didn't look promising back in the mid-2000s. Today, though, with terrorism down to nuisance levels, it's worth looking at again.

As for VW thinking that automated driving is more than a decade away, both Ford and Mercedes have said they expect to have it in production vehicles in five years.

Re:What is plural of "Prius"?

[Nidi62]

Pious?

Re:What is plural of "Prius"?

[OakDragon]

I hear you talking, but all I can think is "People called Romanes, they go, the house?!"

Re:Slashdot fraud/abuse warning... apk

[fisted]

You might be able to fix this with a HOSTS file.