Gridlock-free Autonomous Parking Lots for Autonomous Vehicles

Many cities suffer from a shortage of parking spaces. Research in high density parking (HDP) focuses on how to increase the capacity of parking lots by allowing vehicles to block each other but temporarily give way to other vehicles by driving autonomously upon request. Previous works on HDP did not consider mixing different parking strategies and ignored the possibility of gridlock when multiple vehicles move simultaneously. In this paper, we describe the design of autonomous parking lots, which allows the deployment of different parking strategies in different regions in a parking lot. We present algorithms for checking whether adding a vehicle to an autonomous parking lot can lead to gridlock. Our simulation shows that autonomous parking lots can hold 60% more vehicles given the same amount of space.