Annie Lien is leading Audi’s effort to develop a system that will let cars drop off the driver, then park themselves in specially equipped garages to save time, hassles and gasoline.
A senior engineer for Audi of America’s Electronics Research Lab in Belmont in the Silicon Valley, Lien is in charge of the firm’s piloted parking program to create what may be the first step toward liberating us from the hassles and time expenditure of having to find a parking space for our cars before we can get on with the real purpose of our trip.
Rather than trying
to equip a car with the prohibitively costly sensors and controls that would be
required to drive without human input, Lien is working on the more limited goal
of equipping garages with the extensive 3-D laser sensors needed to guide cars
into their parking spaces, allowing far less costly radar systems on board each
car.
Audi has already
installed a piloted parking system in Ingolstadt, Germany. The driver simply
pulls up outside the garage and lets the system pilot the car to an available
space. When the driver is ready to reclaim the car, he can use a smartphone app
to call it to the garage entrance. The savings of time, as well as gas, would
be significant for busy urban professionals whose lives are often dictated by
the clock.
Lien is leading
Audi’s installation of a somewhat more ambitious system in the garage of the
Mandarin Oriental on the Strip in Las Vegas. Using laser ranging equipment the
system relays 3-D imaging information to specially equipped vehicles. Users can
simply order the car directly from their phones and be picked up in front of
the hotel lobby.
It will be some time
before the piloted parking system is sufficiently standardized for installation
in office towers, luxury hotels and apartments. However, Audi showed two
semi-autonomous parking systems at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES)
in Las Vegas. One can perform a perpendicular parking maneuver while the other
lets a driver park in a home garage using a smartphone or tablet.
“It’s actually going
to take a while before you get a really, fully autonomous car,” Lien said to
explain Audi’s strategy of starting with the parking system instead of the more
ambitious driverless car projects currently being undertaken by Google, Toyota
and other carmakers. “People are surprised when I tell them that you’re not
going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10
years.”
The cost of the
technology needed to make cars fully self-driving isn’t the only challenge.
Legal and insurance issues will first have to be resolved before the average
person will be able to use such cars even if he can afford the likely
six-figure price tags. As yet the closest thing to self-driving cars are
heavily equipped multi-million-dollar experimental vehicles with bulky
unsightly sensors needed to navigate through traffic with experienced
researchers sitting at the wheels.
Lien has been the
Senior Engineer in charge of Strategic Product & Business Development at
the Audi-Volkswagen Group’s ADAS & Autonomous Driving Systems
since February of 2012. Her first major experience with self-driving cars was
gained while heading up an autonomous vehicle group in the 2007 urban Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) challenge.
She received her
education from San Jose State University, San Francisco State University and UCLA.
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