Automatic parking device for automobile

DETAILED DESCRIPTION This invention relates to an automatic device for parking a car in a parking space; particularly, a device used for aiding a driver to make a S-shaped parking maneuver (such as a parallel parking along road side) or a L-shaped parking maneuver (such as a perpendicular parking) in order to overcome the aforesaid difficulties in parking a car manually.
The primary object of the present invention is to provide an automatic parking device for a car moving backwards into a parking space.
The device includes a sensing means to measure the relative position between the car body and the parking space.
The measured data are transmitted into a microcomputer to generate a signal, which will instruct the driver, or control the operation mechanisms of the car, to drive the car timely and appropriately in a backwards direction.
Another object of the present invention is to provide obstacle-sensing means, in which distance-sensing units are used to measure the sideways distance between a car and an obstacle.
Simultaneously, displacement-sensing means are also used to find out the moving distance of the car.
A further object of the present invention is to provide an automatic parking device controlled with a microcomputer which calculates the backing path and controls the driving operation in accordance with the minimum radius of a car to turn using a simple calculation method and a simple control procedure.
The present invention mainly comprises displacement-sensing means installed in the wheel-driving system for measuring the forward and the backward moving distance of a car, obstacle-sensing means which include several distance-measuring units mounted at suitable positions respectively on the car so as to measure the distances between certain parts of the car and obstacles, and a microcomputer which picks up data from the aforesaid displacement-sensing means and the obstacle-sensing means in accordance with the driver's requirement so as to confirm the relative position between the car body and the obstacles on a path that the car moves along, and to estimate if a parking position has sufficient space, and to calculate the control parameters for the car moving backwards along a path; then, the driver may be instructed by the computer, or the computer may directly control various operation mechanisms of the car, to achieve proper and timely driving