FIT student wants to make life easier for drivers. She came up with a way to find parking spaces using radar

Everybody who has ever been to Brno by car during a working week probably knows that finding a parking space is about as likely as winning a lottery. This is especially true if the driver must rely on parking spaces available to everybody and not just to residents. In the future, drivers could be spared having to cruise around hoping somebody decides to leave in part thanks to a technology developed by a FIT BUT student, Kateřina Rafajová. She utilised both radars and GPS mounted in cars to find free parking spaces in the area.

In her Bachelor's thesis, Kateřina Rafajová decided to address a topic bothering many drivers. She decided to detect parking spaces. The combination of technologies she used to search for free parking spaces is an especially interesting aspect of her work. "Today, there are various sensors and radar systems built in many cars. For example as a part of parking assistants. I decided to make use of this," explained the student, adding that the existing solutions usually use static radars.

Even though her solution should use built-in technologies in the future, she used a radar module attached to the car using a magnet in her testing. She then drove the car through Brno, detected the surrounding space and collected data which she subsequently evaluated. "I wrote a program which extracts free parking spaces from the data. In essence, it is a cloud of points in which I search for a free space. In future, these data would be extracted from more cars and would be concentrated in some central point where they would be processed," described Rafajová.

Parking is an issue in most large cities all over the world | Author: unsplash

She would also have to solve more precise recognition of parking types. "So far, the system is not able to distinguish between perpendicular and parallel parking. There is also an issue with recognising free areas that are not intended for parking. One idea is to use another system, such as a camera, and then combined the information. Another is to combine it with map data," Rafajová described possible scenarios in more detail.

For the purposes of her Bachelor's thesis, she supplemented the radar data with a video footage and recorded GPS positions of free parking places. She then checked how accurate the data from her program were using the video and GPS records. "I tested two areas. One was the number of parking spaces. For example, I knew there were five free parking spaces on the street and I was curious how many were found by the program. There, the program achieved 84% success rate in terms of detected parking spaces. The second parameter was the accuracy of GPS positions of found parking spaces. There the deviation was about three meters which isn't bad, but it's pretty meaningless if taken out of context," explained Kateřina Rafajová.

Her solution does not work in real time, which she has no plans to change even in the future. "There is no sense in this working in real time as when somebody passes by a free parking space, they will see it. Therefore, it should mostly work for other drivers. My car will drive by and detect a free parking space. This information then can help another driver who will look for a parking space ten minutes later," explained Rafajová.

Kateřina Rafajová, whose research made waves even at the Excel@FIT conference admits that when she started working on her thesis, she never thought the issue could be so appealing to her. "I never even thought the results of my work could be good. I progressed step by step, issue by issue. At first, I had to acquaint myself with radar technology because that's not something I encountered during my Bachelor's studies. I got a radar, connected it at home and carried it around my apartment to see how it reacts," Rafajová described the beginnings of her work. "There are still many things I need to solve, as well as room for improvement. I would like to work on this during my Master's studies and, if possible, continue my Bachelor's thesis work in my diploma thesis," concluded Kateřina Rafajová, who currently furthers her education in follow-up Master's studies at FIT BUT.