Parking garages have remained fairly outdated even as embedded systems have
been introduced virtually everywhere to improve the human existence. Some provide
information about whether they are full or not, but that does not offer a better parking
experience, it only informs people once they are already there and is inconvenient. This
causes people to circle the parking lot numerous times, making the process inefficient and
wasteful. The SmartPark parking system fills that gap by providing an automated
infrastructure that collects information regarding the availability of parking spaces in a
garage. As modern technology grows and expands the connectivity available on
automobiles, it would be even possible to interface with the car itself to provide parking
information. Each space has an ultrasonic sensor attached to a microcontroller that
communicates with a master, who keeps and displays the overall count of spaces
available. The purpose of this paper is to provide the capability of dynamically adding
and removing slaves, without requiring individual configuration for each slave prior to its
deployment. A sequence of communication exchanges will be described in order for a
slave to register itself with its master. Through a series of messages, the slave will be
able to identify its location and begin reporting the state of its space, and the master will
continue to keep track of existing slaves and their states. The result of the research is a
protocol that allows successful pairing of a new slave with its master without previous
static configuration, which allows an easy deployment of the system without dependence
on its original configuration. This functionality will make the system more scalable,
allowing the parking system to be extended by connecting new slaves wherever they are
needed. It will also make it more maintainable, since slave replacement or relocation will
become an easy task. SmartPark can easily be adapted to existing parking structures with
only the installation of the master and slave nodes, due to its limited resource
requirements. Related work is also discussed and an insight into how this methodology
can be used to modernize current automated parking systems is provided. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/22598 |
| Date | 09 December 2013 |
| Creators | Fuentes-Curiel, Cristina |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | application/pdf |
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