Bosch is launching an autonomous parking technology, Home zone park assist, expected to make its North American market debut by 2019.

With Home zone park assist, drivers can park their cars using a smartphone, even from outside the vehicle. The technology will guide the car, autonomously if needed, to parking spaces up to 100 meters away, where it then maneuvers the car into the space. The technology also learns and saves individual driving maneuvers, says Boshch, and can perform maneuvers automatically on the press of a button.

“Parking is a natural step on the path to fully autonomous vehicles,” said Frank Sgambati, director of marketing and product innovation for Chassis Systems Control in North America, Robert Bosch.

Home zone park assist is a partially automated function that still requires some monitoring by the driver. It was designed for repeated parking maneuvers – for example, at home or into an assigned parking garage space, says Bosch.

Drivers can train Bosch’s Home zone park assist themselves

Here is how the car learns automated parking – The driver activates the assistant’s learning function when the car is in the desired starting position. Then, they drive the car slowly to a parking space no more than 100 meters away in a trial run. The system saves the starting position, destination and the route driven between them. From then on, Home zone park assist can take over parking the car from the defined starting position. Drivers can choose to remain inside the car or to control the process from outside, either using a dead man’s switch on the ignition key or via smartphone. The Bosch system is capable of learning and retrieving up to 10 different driving maneuvers for repeated parking situations.

Assistant independently detours around static obstacles

Various Bosch sensors enable Home zone park assist. The solution draws on, for example, a total of 12 ultrasonic sensors installed in the front and rear bumpers plus a stereo video camera mounted near the rear-view mirror. Instead of the stereo video camera, the solution also can use four radar sensors, one on each corner of the vehicle.

Home zone park assist uses the sensors for orienting itself for the drive to and into the parking space. It also can recall any objects noted during the trial run, such as posts or trees. The system is constantly comparing the position of the car with the stored position of objects in the vehicle’s surroundings. If the sensors detect an unknown static obstacle such as a garbage can left in the car’s path, the car automatically stops. If the obstacle can be avoided by deviating slightly from the preset route, the car will steer independently around it. Home zone park assist technology can correct for deviations of up to six-and-a-half feet when planning its route.

Home zone park assist also is capable of pulling out of a parking space autonomously via a smartphone. The system brings the car automatically to the defined starting position, so that the driver can simply step in and drive off.