BMW demonstrated a modified version of its BMW i3 electric car on the top floor of a Las Vegas casino garage, the can autonomously park itself and then can pick you up when you’re ready to go–BMW calls this the Remote Valet Parking Assistant.
As simple as it this gets, you can send your car away to look for a parking spot, go shopping and then comes back again when you’re finished! BMW used a Samsung smart watch to issue the commands to retrieve the car in thier demonstration.
In order to do so and get readings of its environment, the car is equipped with four laser scanners on each side of the car. BMW also needs a map of the garage. From there, the car’s algorithm can sift through the map and the information coming off the sensors to find a parking spot. This may seem impractical, i mean having to get a map of every single parking garage!
Also, during the demonstration, BMW showed off a collision avoidance system using the same four laser scanners. The sensors detect when a collision looks immanent and automatically stops the cars within a few inches of the object.
Google has spurred many automakers to start getting serious about self-driving car technology. But like BMW, many are going slow and testing out self-driving features in tiny iterations as they believe they are very experienced in building cars and they have to adopt more processes of an IT company.
Wondering how long before we start seeing this in BMW cars’ brand? The self-driving technology is still in development at the research stage, but according to the company they believe it can introduce it into the market in five to eight years. restrained by two major obstacles the first is simply the cost of the sensors, which would scare away most consumers. The other is the issue of legality–especially in Germany where there are explicit bans on any kind of autonomous driving.
