Author: Philip Constantine, CEO of LightWare LiDAR LLC.
Parkki is a French technology company that is using LiDAR technology to make parking your car in a store easier and faster, ultimately achieving a smarter experience.
Speculations about the impact of technology on our lives tend to focus on dramatic and exciting things. Flying car. Space travelling. Humanoid robot. Laser gun.
What it often conceals is the impact on more benign things. Artificial intelligence powers our Google search. Sensors that monitor fresh produce in transit. Plug and play payment system. Or smart parking management, for that matter.
Although science fiction predicts that we will all run around in flying cars, and the weird billionaire said that cars will drive us now, we are still on the road and behind the steering wheel (other than that, even flying cars need to be parked somewhere. ). Like taxes, difficult in-laws, and lost socks, finding parking spaces in parking lots is a common problem. This is why the seemingly prosaic technological innovation behind Parkki is so exciting.
Parking smarter
In short, the goal of this French technology company is to make parking smarter, easier, and more transparent. To this end, they use LiDAR sensors to monitor the availability of parking spaces and provide this information to customers through digital signage and customized mall mobile parking apps. The idea is that by removing the pressure of finding parking spaces, shopping malls and retail spaces can better meet customer needs and increase the likelihood of them coming back—in fact, increasing customer loyalty through a better parking experience.
However, it is not just customers who benefit from this information. It turns out that the humble parking lot is a rich source of information about consumer behavior and the use of public space. By analyzing traffic flow, parking time, which parking spaces have the highest occupancy rate and similar data, mall management can better manage infrastructure, logistics and tenants, and plan future development.
The eyes of heaven
Parkki uses various technologies to monitor parking lots, one of which is Lighting SF30/C Lidar sensor. The company has placed more than 100 such small power and cost-effective sensors on top of street lights in parking lots around Lille, France, each of which can scan a wide area covering up to 40 parking spaces.
LiDAR stands for “light detection and ranging”, and its working principle is to pulse lasers of different wavelengths at an abnormally fast speed in the surrounding world and measure the time it takes for the light to return to the sensor to build a map of its surrounding environment. Since the device itself generates light, it is not affected by ambient light or weather changes.
In the past, LiDAR devices were cumbersome and expensive, but advances in miniaturization and a sharp drop in prices—such as demonstrated by LightWare SF30/C—opened up a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications for this technology. For example, LiDAR scanners can analyze the size of vehicles driving on toll roads and charge them accordingly. They can monitor the movement of pedestrians and vehicles at intersections to improve traffic management. When there is actual traffic there, they can activate or increase the intensity of street lights, thereby saving electricity. More complex applications include building a 3D map of the city that shows pollution and sunlight movement, enabling better urban planning.
So far, Parkki’s solutions have mainly focused on the retail sector, but they plan to extend it to airports and other large public places, bringing us one step closer to the city of the future.
