Can You Imagine Leaving Your Car at the Entrance of a Parking Lot and It Parks Itself? It's Now a Reality

LEPAS, the newly introduced Chinese automotive brand, is set to elevate autonomous parking to a new level. The next-generation APA system will allow drivers to exit their vehicles and proceed to their destinations while the car parks, shuts down, and locks itself autonomously. Taking it a step further, the VPD (Valet Parking Driver) system, developed in collaboration with Huawei, enables drivers to leave their cars at the entrance of a large parking facility and forget about parking. The vehicle will autonomously find a free spot, navigate to it while recognising obstacles, other vehicles, and pedestrians, park automatically, and send a message confirming the parking location once the manoeuvre is complete.

Firstly, the APA (Automatic Parking Assist) function can manoeuvre and park within seconds, whether in parallel, perpendicular, or even extremely tight spaces with margins under 20 cm. Its operation is straightforward. Upon reaching a parking area, the driver opens the app, and a bird's-eye view of the vehicle's surroundings appears on the central screen, highlighting available spots or potential parking areas with blue lines. The driver simply taps on the desired space, and the system performs all manoeuvres autonomously with absolute smoothness, safety, and precision.

The second feature, RPA (Remote Parking Assist), allows drivers to manoeuvre the vehicle from outside using their mobile phones as a remote control. This technology provides a practical solution for parking or retrieving the car in very tight spaces where opening doors or manoeuvring from inside would be difficult or impossible. The app interface is very simple and intuitive, allowing safe remote control of the car's movement.

Throughout the process, the car moves slowly while the system maintains active distance control using ultrasonic radars and 360-degree cameras. If the vehicle detects an obstacle, pedestrian, or nearby vehicle, it stops automatically. The driver can halt the process at any time by releasing the phone button ("hold-to-move" safety function). Once the car completes the parking manoeuvre, it automatically switches to P mode, and the system confirms successful parking on the phone screen.

Behind the APA (Automatic Parking Assist) and RPA (Remote Parking Assist) functions lies a state-of-the-art hardware and software architecture that combines environmental perception, real-time data processing, and artificial intelligence applied to dynamic vehicle control.

The LEPAS L8 uses a set of high-resolution cameras to provide a 360-degree panoramic view. The cameras accurately detect parking lines, curbs, pedestrians, and obstacles. These cameras work alongside an ultrasonic radar system that measures short distances. All this information is combined through a sensor fusion process, generating a virtual reconstruction of the environment that updates several times per second.

The core of the system is a high-end SoC (System-on-Chip) that simultaneously executes object detection and trajectory planning, adjusting steering angle, acceleration, and braking in real-time; on software developed with artificial intelligence algorithms trained with millions of parking manoeuvres in multiple scenarios.