If you drive for a living, it stands to reason that you'd excel at parking. Long-haul truckers may be the exception. It's not the parallel parking that gets them—most avoid shimmying between cars on packed streets anyway. No, they struggle with it because there simply aren't enough parking spots.

Despite the acres of concrete surrounding the truck stops and that dot the nation's interstates, there aren't enough parking spaces—or enough spaces in the right places—to accommodate the growing number of trucks hauling stuff around the country. According to the Department of Transportation, which made an exhaustive survey of on this ultra-specific subject, 75 percent of drivers said they regularly have trouble finding a safe place to park when it's time to bed down. In desperation, some park on the shoulder, a ramp, or an abandoned gas station. Others keep rolling, burning fuel and time as they continue the search.

This is troubling. Researchers have likened the effect of driving while fatigued to driving while drunk. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration found "driver non-performance" like falling asleep at the wheel played a role in 12 percent of big-rig crashes between 2001 and 2003. Driving while sleepy kills, and driving while sleepy when pulling several tons of cargo can kill a lot more. You can understand why people want to solve this problem.

One way of doing that is making it easier to find a place to sleep, something University of Minnesota computer scientists are doing with cameras and image processing software. The system monitors parking lots and provide a real-time tally of spaces.

The team, led by Nikolaos Papanikolopoulous and funded by the Federal Highway Administration and others, is now expanding the $2 million pilot project they launched at three locations along Interstate 94 in 2013. Ultimately, they'd like to install it throughout Minnesota and seven other midwestern states.

Cameras are the centerpiece of the system, hanging like street lamps alongside parking lots and rest stops. Image recognition software scans the images and identifies vacant spaces, and a computer transmits that information to signs along the highway. "Ten spaces ahead," one might tell a weary driver pushing on through a rainy night. Unlike other automated systems that use embedded ground sensors, this tech is accurate 95 percent of the time.

University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies

Papanikolopoulos can't say how many people use the system, but truckers aren't the only ones interested in this information. Because the project is funded by taxpayers ("We don't get a penny for this," he says), Minnesota ensures all the data is available to the public. That's led the private sector—those who run truck stops, perhaps?—to mine the data to help inform business decisions. At one point, their queries crashed the team's website.

Meanwhile, the trucking industry wants to find a way of easily transmitting this information directly into everyone's truck. Drivers' trucks might straight-up speak to them when there's a spot nearby. The steering wheel might vibrate, or an alert might come through the radio. However it happens, it shouldn't happen on a smartphone. As bad as it is to drive while drowsy, it's even worse to text while driving.