Path Planning for Autonomous Car Parking

The path planning problem for autonomous car parking has been widely studied. However, it is challenging to design a path planner that can cope with parking in tight environment for all common parking scenarios. The important practical concerns in design, including low computational costs and little human’s knowledge and intervention, make the problem even more difficult. In this work, a path planner is developed using a novel four-phase algorithm. By using some switching control laws to drive two virtual cars to a target line, a forward path and a reverse path are obtained. Then the two paths are connected along the target line. As illustrated by the simulation results, the proposed path planning algorithm is fast, highly autonomous, sufficiently general and can be used in tight environment.