The Swedish manufacturer has developed a concept car that will find a vacant parking space and park itself, all without the driver inside.
Says Thomas Broberg, senior safety advisor Volvo Car Group, "Autonomous Parking is a concept technology that relieves the driver of the time-consuming task of finding a vacant parking space. The driver just drops the vehicle off at the entrance to the car park and picks it up in the same place later."
Transmitters in road infrastructure, called Vehicle 2 Infrastructure technology, inform the driver when the service is available. He will then use a cell-phone application to activate Autonomous Parking and walk away from the car.
The vehicle uses sensors to find and navigate to the parking space. When the driver returns, the procedure is reserved, with the car returning itself to the driver.
Making safe interaction with other cars and pedestrians possible is a combination of autonomous driving and detection and auto brake. Speed and braking are thus adapted to insure smooth integration in die parking environment.
"Our approach is based on the principle that autonomously driven cars must be able to move safely in environments with non-autonomous vehicles and unprotected road users," says Broberg.
Volvo Car Group’s aim is to become the leader of autonomous driving by moving beyond concepts and actually delivering these technologies to cars that will reach the customer.
The company was also the only car manufacturer that participated in the Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) project, which focused on technology that can be implemented on conventional highways on which platooned traffic operates in a mixed environment with other road users.
The SARTRE platoon included a lead truck that was followed by four autonomously driven Volvos at speeds of up to 90km/h, in some cases with no more than a four-metre gap between the vehicles.
Although these technologies are still being developed, Volvo aims to introduce the first features with autonomous steering in the all-new XC90, which will be revealed at the end of 2014.
