► Autonomous valet parking
► Mercedes Museum debut
► Coming to a car park near you?
Bosch and Daimler have teamed up to demonstrate its new fully-autonomous valet parking technology at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Germany.
Specifically, the two brands have made the world’s first autonomous valet service for those visiting the museum, which will go into proper public service in 2018.
The whole multi-storey car park at the museum in Stuttgart is decked out with sensors to guide the autonomous Mercedes valet cars around it. Basically, Bosch provides the infrastructure, while Mercedes’ autonomous tech connects to it and drives the car in and out of an assigned space.
Visitors to the museum can activate the service via an app on their phone, which calls one of the autonomous valet cars to the designated pick-up area for them to drive away. Conversely, when arriving into the car park, the visitors exit the car and tell it to park on its own.
Dr. Michael Hafner, Merc’s boss of automated driving, said: ‘Autonomous driving will be here faster than many of us realise. Driverless parking at the museum impressively demonstrates how advanced the technology already is.’
The service within the car park is also being treated as a test bed for usage further afield. Bosch says its sensors and tech can be retrofitted to any existing multi-storey and that if the cars are autonomously parked (and therefore don’t need a driver to get in or out) the tech giant even suggests that up to 20% more vehicles could fit in certain car parks.
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