Hitachi Automotive Systems and Clarion Develop “Park-by-Memory” Autonomous Parking Technology

Hitachi Automotive Systems, Ltd. and Clarion Co., Ltd. teamed up to develop a Park-by-Memory autonomous parking technology. This technology has the capability to remember the environment surrounding users’ home parking spaces.

There have been many instances of traffic accidents caused by operational mistakes during parking and this is prompting the drive to develop safe autonomous parking technology that can minimize the scope for human errors. Park-by-Memory can be used to automatically park vehicles in frequently used parking spaces such as at home or at work. The two companies worked jointly on the development of this technology with Clarion contributing its external recognition technology while Hitachi Automotive Systems contributed steering and brake actuators and integrated vehicle control technology.

Park-By-Memory works by memorizing parking environments and parking patterns. The system integrates bird’s-eye footage provided by SurroundEye, Clarion’s proprietary camera system which can be fitted to the left and right sides of the front and back of the vehicle. Detection data on surrounding structures can be obtained using sonar signals as well as GPS positional information. Thus, vehicles equipped with Park-by-Memory can notify drivers that it is possible to park when the vehicle comes near memorized parking spaces. All drivers have to do to initiate autonomous parking is press a button in the vehicle, or use their smartphone app.

Park-by-Memory pulls in highly precise image recognition data from SurroundEye so that it can park autonomously in parking spaces of various shapes, including parking spaces that are only demarcated by white lines. It also uses existing general vehicle navigation GPS information instead of a specialized positional information system, which has facilitated early launch of this technology.
Hitachi Automotive Systems and Clarion will continue to work on refining driving support technology through advanced external recognition and integrated vehicle control technology.