TTU Capstone Students Working To Develop Program To Better Parking

A group of Tennessee Tech students is working to develop a program that will make parking on campus more efficient through a computer science capstone project.

Lecturer Jesse Roberts said the idea was generated through a partnership with another institute. He said the basic idea is that it would look for available parking spots and make those known to students.

“The two ways that that is being envisioned is via an app where students can log in and view the number of available parking spots in any given lot,” Roberts “And the other way would be through signs posted near the parking lot similar to what you would see at the airport.

Roberts said students are in the early stages of collecting data and developing the program. He said it will take a few years and several iterations of the program before a finalized product will be available. However, he said they hope to have a preliminary program available sometime soon.

Roberts said one hurdle the team has to tackle is figuring out which system would make the most sense. He said that several parking lots at Tennessee Tech aren’t suitable for the signs program and others are not for the app.

“If there is an easy way to monitor the ingress and egress then you can just count the cars coming in and count the cars coming out and it should work fairly well,” Roberts said. “The problem is a lot of the lots at Tech don’t fall into that category and a lot of them have a very large number of incoming lanes and a large number of outgoing lanes and some aren’t even marked. os they could be either or so there’s not a good way to monitor that. Instead, they’re looking to monitor using AI-based techniques using computer vision.”

Roberts said this capstone year has eight students working on the project. He said future capstone students working on the project will continue to improve upon the progress, fixing potential buds and making the program more efficient.