Partner Search

Summary

A small Hungarian company has been developing an indoor positioning and navigation system called iParking for vehicle navigation based on wireless and optical technologies. The prototype of the system is deployed in the parking garage of a shopping mall. Advantages include reduced time in parking lot seeking, decreased human power in traffic control, reduced CO2 emission and less driver frustration. The company seeks industrial partners interested in licence agreement and further development.

Full description

Nowadays positioning based navigation is an integrated part of our everyday routines. For instance, it is hard to succeed without a GPS based navigation system in a bigger city today. However, indoor positioning and navigation is still in its infancy, although its application would be desirable in many areas. One obvious application domain is the automatic navigation of the vehicle entering into a parking garage to an appropriate free parking lot. The use of an effective indoor navigation system is convenient for the drivers, decreases the unnecessary circling in the garage and reduces air pollution.

The iParking indoor positioning and navigation system is based on Wi-Fi and optical tracking solutions. The system monitors the occupancy of the parking lots and with the aid of the background wireless and optical infrastructure tracks the position of the vehicle entering the parking garage and navigates the driver to a free parking lot. Lot selection is handled at the entry point of the garage based on simple preferences, e.g. the closest disabled parking space. The navigation interface is the drivers smartphone or LCD panels mounted in the junctions of the garage.

The technology helps the customers to find easily and fast the free parking place which corresponds most their preferences and using the application results less CO2 emission.
This solution could be extended to more shopping malls and also could be supplemented with other services such as navigation in the shopping mall to the proper shop and back to the garage.

Innovative Aspects

Innovations include the integration of state-of-the-art indoor positioning and navigation, modular and extensible system design, and modern user interface on smart mobile devices.

Advantages of using the intelligent indoor parking system include
- reduced time in parking lot seeking,
- decreased human power in traffic control,
- reduced CO2 emission and less driver frustration.
- it saves fuel, it is an environmental-friendly technology.

On top of the basic positioning and navigation system other location based applications can be introduced, such as personal navigation, shop advertisements, virtual tours.

Partner expertise sought:

- Type of partner sought:
Industrial partners interested in collaboration and further development.

- Specific area of activity of the partner:
Manufacturers of parking lot monitoring systems; parking garages and shopping malls interested in deploying iParking.

- Task to be performed by the partner sought:
- Adaptation to specific needs - to integrate their solutions with iParking,
- to develop location based applications to extend iParking with other location based services
- acceptance of licence.