VEStellaLab
Introducing Autonomous Driving for Parking

The moment an autonomous car enters a building for parking, GPS navigation is no longer helpful. Now, if that building happens to be a multi-storied indoor parking space with a capacity of about 500 cars and no map for guidance, you are left with no choice but to take the wheel and manually drive your way to find a free spot. The sensation of feeling lost at that point might be an understatement. The indoor precise positioning technology, Watchmile, developed by the South Korean startup, VEStellaLab, is here to overcome such setbacks for autonomous vehicle owners.

Watchmile is the world’s first indoor parking navigation system for guiding an autonomous vehicle to an empty parking space. The technology combines closed-circuit televisions (CCTV), IoT-based sensors, and smartphone gyro sensors to determine the exact location of the driver. Vision AI then analyzes the real-time data to offer a fast search for empty parking spaces. The search can also be optimized based on the preferences entered in advance by the driver. Once parked, Watchmile provides useful information, such as the exact location of the vehicle, and the time it was parked, eliminating unnecessary time and effort.

“With our cutting edge and future-oriented indoor navigation technology, we are adding the missing pieces and fine-tuning autonomous driving—making it whole,” says Sangsu Jung, president and CEO of VEStellaLab. The company also offers map creation technology that uses vector mapping to lighten video data that are perfectly suitable for autonomous driving.

This technology is breaking new ground in South Korea, where limited outdoor space is paving the way for many numerous indoor parking buildings to ensure secured parking for more than 20 million cars. Watchmile’s location tracking, positioning, image recognition, obstacle/hazard detecting, and vehicle movement tracking technologies are effectively helping South Korea’s autonomous vehicle owners not only to navigate their cars to their parking destinations but also conveniently guide them in any indoor environment. However, the Watchmile service is not just confined to the Korean market, it can also provide parking navigation services to other countries that faces similar parking issues.

How Watchmile’s successes are setting a benchmark in the domain can be best reflected through a recent client success story. A department store was facing issues because of its limited space for cars, especially on weekends, which bring two to three times the number of vehicles. The store adopted Watchmile on a trial basis, and the results were remarkable. The number of vehicles circling the lot while drivers searched for an empty space decreased by more than 25 percent. Labor costs dropped by more than 80 percent as the number of workers needed decreased from 10 to only two.

In a world that is increasingly progressing toward smarter cities with smart transportation, Watchmile’s intelligent parking solution is just the starting point of what VEStellaLab can offer in the automotive space by collaborating with construction companies, automotive companies, and other autonomous driving solution providers. Derived from VE (first two letters of “vehicle”) and Stella (“star” in Latin), VEStellaLab intends to serve as the guiding star for countless autonomous cars on the road. The company is also looking to expand the horizons of Watchmile service beyond the automotive space, leveraging autonomous robotics technology to fully function in the smart logistics and factory settings. Supporting this leap is the vast collection of Watchmile’s indoor database. Without a doubt, advancements in such a “last-mile” technology will be muchneeded autonomous solutions, and that is precisely what VEStellaLab is focusing on.