My group (with Thomas Kromkamp and Douwe Bart Mulder) designed a smart parking system to guide drivers to an empty parking spot in a parking garage. Using colored lights in the road, the time it costs to find a spot can be decreased enormously. Not only is this easier for the drivers, it’s also better for the environment and the capacity of the parking garage.

Sadly, we didn’t have the time to build the devices. Instead, we made a simulation of the system:

The blue circle represents the entrance node. All grey circles are road nodes. The small red circles are parking spots. Click on a parking spot to mark it as available and take a look at the result. You can add more road nodes and parking spaces using the R and P keys.