German transport technology giant Continental is integrating autonomous driving technology from Israeli firm Imagry to support automated parking for mass market passenger cars.

Imagry is a developer of mapless autonomous driving software. Continental will be integrating part of its technology in the Continental autonomous driving (AD) platform for passenger vehicles.

The first feature introduced by Continental allows the vehicle to explore a parking lot, detect a suitable parking space, and park the vehicle all without the driver touching the steering wheel.

“Imagry’s technology approach is a great add-on to Continental’s software stack for assisted and automated driving,” said Aniss Ouyeder, head of partnerships at Continental. “We are impressed by the talented and highly motivated Imagry team and we are looking forward to jointly realise new automated parking features.”

Imagry software combines AI technology that captures and recognises a real-time video feed with a deep neural network to make complex driving decisions instantly, based on current driving conditions. As such, it is mapless, that is not limited to pre-learned geographic areas.

Over the past three years Imagry has been operating vehicles equipped with its autonomous driving software on public roads in the USA, Germany and Israel.

The global automobile industry is moving from hardware-based design to software-centric electronic devices. The versatility of this platform allows vehicle manufacturers to offer features such as autonomous valet parking as an add-on to their entire range of vehicles. Furthermore, OEMs will be able to deploy software features to the vehicle even after it has left the factory, using over the air (OTA) transmission for software updates.

Imagry’s autonomous driving motion planning technology will be used. The motion planning layer is a deep neural network that learns to drive by imitating human behaviour, making motion planning decisions in real time. It extrapolates and generalises by drawing on the learned behaviour to navigate new roads independently, making complex data-driven decisions based on what it perceives in the moment.

For the first phase of the autonomous valet parking feature, the driver must be in the vehicle, monitoring the surroundings and the car’s manoeuvres. The driver decides when, and if, to engage the autonomous valet parking feature.

“Autonomous parking is just the first step in the path to full autonomous driving,” said Eran Ofir, CEO at Imagry. “The capabilities of our mapless system extend easily to the open road, enabling the vehicle to operate freely in geographic areas which were previously unknown to it. We’re confident that Continental OEM customers will soon appreciate the full extent of our exciting offering.”

Founded in 1871, Continental offers technology for vehicles, machines, traffic and transportation. In 2022, Continental generated sales of €39.4bn and employs around 200,000 people in 57 countries and markets.

Imagry, established in 2015 for high-end computer vision applications and specialising in the automotive sector since 2018, is an autonomous driving software provider that has created a mapless driving system. Bio-inspired technology combines a real-time vision-based perception network and imitation-learning AI for a driving decision-making network. Using low-cost sensors, it eliminates the need for external digital mapping of roads and cities. It can be installed on passenger cars as well as buses and shuttles.