Virtual Valet lets your smartphone park your car

Will Ferguson, reporter

You're on the third lap around the car park, there are no open spaces, and you're already 15 minutes late for your appointment. Right now you're wishing you could jump out of the car and let it go find its own spot.

Good news: now there's an app for that. Virtual Valet lets your iPhone tell your car to park without you in it. "You pull up to the kerb, push a button on your smartphone and the car takes care of everything else," says Aaron Steinfeld, the lead researcher for the project at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "Then you tell it to come back whenever you are done."

(Image: Gail Shotlander/Getty)

To find its own spot, the system uses a sensor suite similar to ones found in many luxury cars. This includes a motion sensor that scans for moving cars and pedestrians, and a forward-facing laser rangefinder normally found in adaptive cruise control to determine the distance of objects in front of the car. Information from these sensors is then fed to an onboard computer to plot the vehicle's course. The user can watch the whole process from their phone. "It works indoors, outdoors and could even work at your home," Steinfeld says.

Better still, it will be affordable. The team has spent the last year moving from high-end imaging and processing equipment to less expensive components. In experiments, the vehicle was able to navigate through a crowded parking structure, find an empty spot, and park all on its own. And, Steinfeld says, the greatest appeal of the Virtual Valet Parking App is that it requires no change to existing parking facilities or infrastructure.

For the moment, the only car equipped for control by Virtual Valet is Carnegie Mellon's modified Jeep Wrangler, which the researchers have named NavLab11. But Steinfeld hopes that major car manufacturers will adopt the technology.

It might be more than technology that holds up the show, however. Self-driving cars have? been licensed in only three US states - California, Nevada and Florida - and it's unclear how this app would mesh with self-driving laws. Until these questions are settled, your insurance provider might balk at covering a ding from a parking incident. "Guaranteeing reliability and safety is the key issue," says Jim Osborn of the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute. "Right now this is not something we would expect an auto insurer to underwrite."

The research will be presented at Auto Apps and Mobile Device Evolution 2012 this December in Berlin, Germany.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/250b67f0/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A120C10A0Cvirtual0Evalet0Elets0Eyour0Esmartp0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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