A Route Guidance System for Car Finding in Indoor Parking Garages

Authors: Pei-Chun Lee, Sheng-Shih Wang

Abstract:

This paper presents a route guidance system for car owners to find their cars in parking garages. The presents system comprises a positioning-assisting subsystem and a car-finding mobile app. The positioning-assisting subsystem mainly uses the iBeacon technology for indoor positioning. The car-finding mobile app guides car owners to their cars based on a non-map navigation strategy. This study also designs a virtual coordinate system to support identifying the locations of parking spaces and iBeacon devices. We use Arduino and Android as the platforms to implement the proposed positioning-assisting subsystem and car-finding mobile app, respectively. We have also deployed the system in a parking garage in our campus for testing. Experimental results verify that our system can efficiently and correctly guide car owners to the parking spaces of their cars.

Keywords: Guidance, iBeacon, mobile app, navigation.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1339486

References:

[1] M. Y. I. Idris, Y. Y. Leng, E. M. Tamil, N. M. Noor, and Z. Razak, “Car park system: a review of smart parking system and its technology,” Information Technology Journal, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 101–113, 2009.
[2] N. Newman, “Apple iBeacon technology briefing,” Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 222–225, Jan./Mar. 2014.
[3] P. Martin, B. J. Ho, N. Grupen, S. Muñoz, and M. Srivastava, “An iBeacon primer for indoor localization: demo abstract,” in Proc. ACM Conference on Embedded Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings (BuildSys), Nov. 2014, pp. 190–191.
[4] R. Srinivasan, F. H. Landau, and P. P. Jovanis, “A simulator evaluation of five in-vehicle route guidance systems,” in Proc. 6th International Conference on Vehicle Navigation and Information Systems, 1995, pp. 90–95.
[5] S. S. Wang and W. T. Wang, “An intelligent WSN-based parking guidance system,” in Proc. 2014 International Conference on Communication and Information Technology, Tokyo, Japan, May, 2014.
[6] R. A. Weant, Parking Garage Planning and Operation. Eno Foundation for Transportation, Inc., 1978, pp. 76–77. (Online) Available: http://ntl.bts.gov/lib/26000/26700/26782/PARKING_GARAGE_PLANNING_AND_OPERATION.pdf. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[7] Carl Walker, Inc. “Parking structure design guidelines,” pp. 9. (Online) Available: http://parkandgo.org/media/parking_studies/appendI.pdf. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[8] “Show the way” app, (Online) Available: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kozaxinan.locator. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[9] “Search car lite” app, (Online) Available: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.SearchCarLite. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[10] “Where is my car” app, (Online) Available: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.s2hmobile.mycar. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[11] “MyCar locator free” app, (Online) Available: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nomadrobot.mycarlocatorfree. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[12] Waze, (Online) Available: https://www.waze.com. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[13] “Search car” app, (Online) Available: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ycw.SearchCar. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[14] “Car-finding helper” app, (Online) Available: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jarvislin.carfinder. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[15] “Section 9.0 parking lot design standards,” University of Houston Campus Design Guidelines and Standards Parking Lot Design Standards, pp. 5–7, Jan. 2014, (Online) Available: http://www.uh.edu/facilities-services/departments/fpc/design-guidelines/09_parking.pdf. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).
[16] “Bluno – an Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0,” (Online) Available: http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=1044. (Accessed 20 Aug. 2016).