Virtual Leash – device-less remote parking based on ultrasonic sensor detection

Sammanfattning: In today’s car industry more and more focus is put on autonomous driving and driving assistance. There are functions being developed that are supposed to assist the driver as well as functions that will be fully autonomous. Parking is an area where car companies are developing a lot of functions related to driver assistance and autonomous driving. One of the main reasons for this is that a lot of people think it is difficult to park their cars. Therefore, functions related to parking assistance have a high customer value. And in order to make a good function related to parking assistance and autonomous parking the function must be easy to use. In this thesis work a proof of concept was made for the use of ultrasonic sensors in an automatic parking function, where you can remotely control the movement of a car in parking situations without any remote device. Instead of controlling the car with a phone or a key, the car was to recognize the user as the driver and allow him/her to lead it in and out of parking spaces, by having it following his/her movement. The purpose of the thesis work was to investigate whether or not ultrasonic sensors could be used to track the movement of the user outside of the car, to be able to authorize the user as the driver. If the ultrasonic sensors could detect a specific pattern of movement from the user, the user would be allowed to remotely operate the vehicle. A simulation model was created that was able to read ultrasonic data from a test car and evaluate the movement of the user. This model could read data from a recorded log and in real time in a test car. Since the purpose was to evaluate the performance of the ultrasonic sensors, other signals related to the function was mocked in the simulation.