Design and implementation of path planning algorithm for vehicle parking

Parking is an important and indispensable skill for drivers. With rapid urban development, the automatic parking assistant system is one of the key components in future automobiles. Path planning is always essential for solving parking problems. In this paper, a path planning method is proposed for parking using straight lines and circular curves of different radius without collisions with obstacles. The parking process is divided into two steps in which the vehicle reaches the goal state through the intermediate state from the initial state. The intermediate state will be selected from the intermediate state set with a certain criterion in order to avoid obstacles. Similarly, an appropriate goal state will be selected based on the size of the parking lot. In addition, an automatic parking system is built, which effectively achieves the parking lot perception, path planning and performs parking processes in the environment with obstacles. The result of simulations and experiments demonstrates the feasibility and practicality of the proposed method and the automatic parking system.