This was a year long Computer Science project with the aim of developing useful software, where the student had relatively free reign over the project goals and brief as long as it was sufficiently complex. I chose to create a retrofittable parallel parking assistant to be installed on cars without park-assist technology, which utilised computer vision and data about the individual car's dimensions and turning radius to guide the user to successfully park in a parallel parking space between two vehicles.

The computer used for this project was a StereoPi, a custom RaspberryPi based computer with two RaspberryPi Camera ports to provide stereo vision to the computer. I prototyped a mount for the device to sit on a vehicle dashboard to be easily accessible to the user while driving, without being distracted. This project was programmed in Python 3 and utilised OpenCV for computer vision, along with Microsoft Excel to store a table of cars with their dimensions. The GUI was created using Tkinter, along with a custom parking animation created using Scratch. 

The user experience allowed the user to select their car from a list of common cars, or alternatively add their own car's dimensions as a new entry on this list if their car was not already there. While the program is running, the stereo camera scans the distance between parked cars and detects whether it is big enough for the car to park in. If the program finds a suitable space, the parking button will turn blue. If the user wishes to park in the detected space, they should click the blue parking button to initiate the parking sequence, at which point the program will guide the user on where to move the car and how to turn the steering wheel in order to successfully park in the chosen space.

This project was successfully tested on a Toyota Rav 4 and a Mercedes C Class, and was determined as a success overall. The project satisfied all of the criteria set out in the report brief. Due to COVID 19 changing assessment regulations during this project, a raw mark was never given, however this project still contributed to an overall A grade in this subject. Should you wish to learn more about this project, commission a similar product, or read my final report, please contact me.