IOT Parking System

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Car parking is a major issues in modern congested cities of today. There simply are too many vehicles on the road and not enough parking space. This has led to the need for efficient parking management systems. Thus we demonstrate the use of IOT based parking management system that allows for efficient parking space utilization using IOT technology

What is IOT in simple words?

The Internet of Things is simply “A network of Internet connected objects able to collect and exchange data.” It is commonly abbreviated as IOT. In a simple way to put it, you have “things” that sense and collect data and send it to the internet. The internet of things, or IOT, is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

Introduction

The device that you build is an application of Internet of Things (IOT). The electronic device that you build can assist the drivers in selecting the suitable parking spot for them. The data that the system collects will be sent to the cloud and anyone across the globe can access the data to do some analysis.

You can either do this project using an Arduino microcontroller or a Raspberry Pi. If you are using an Arduino Uno then you should also embed a WiFi module on it to establish the connection to internet and send the data live. The raspberry pi will be already embedded with a WiFi module, so you don’t require an extra one to establish the internet connection.

The device that you build will get the data of the parking slot status (whether it is occupied or not) from the digital IR sensors or the pi cams that are present over there. These sensors send the data to the microcontroller and in turn the data will be processed and the status of parking slots will be displayed to the user. If you are using Pi cam, then the image captured will have the data about the availability of parking slots. The data will also be sent to the cloud which can be integrated onto an Android App, so that the user can see the slots available directly from their mobile phones.

Implementation

The automated parking system using IoT that you develop can be implemented in covered parks, open parks and also street side parking. The smart parking system will have a cloud service provider that provides cloud storage to store information about the parking status in the slots. There will be a centralized server which stores the information about the number of parking slots, availability status and also the parking time.

The functionalities of the components of automated parking system project are as follows,

Centralized server: This maintains the information about the parking slots and its availability
Raspberry Pi: This will act as the microcontroller for the project and all the other sensors will connected to it
Camera: The Pi camera will be connected to the microcontroller and will be used to validate the parking slots as either empty or occupied
IR sensors: It will be used to sense the presence of vehicle in the parking slots by sending out IR radiations
Navigation system: This will give the signals that will guide the users to navigate and go to the nearest available parking slot
Display device: This will be the screen that displays the status of the parking slots and change real-time
User device: This can either be the mobile phone or a website which can be used by the user to get the availability of parking slots directly