Grid-based Parking Lot Exploration

As the number of vehicles travelling on roads is increasing rapidly, it is getting more difficult to find a free parking space. Literature provided methods mainly focus on installed sensor-based parking space detection, but most of the traditional parking lots are not equipped with sensors. In these traditional parking garages or parking lots, an exploration path is required, in order that the sensors of the vehicle could detect the free parking spaces. The exploration path should approach all the possible free parking spaces. It is also possible, that some areas in the parking lot are more preferred (e.g. near to an entrance), so the path should visit them first and more frequently. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a grid-based method, which is applicable for planning the exploration of parking garages and parking lots.