This paper considers the perpendicular parking problem of car-like vehicles for both forward and reverse maneuvers. A sensor based controller with a weighted control scheme is proposed and is compared with a state of the art path planning approach. The perception problem is threated as well considering a Velodyne VLP-16 as the sensor providing the required exteroceptive information. A methodology to extract the necessary information for both approaches from the sensor data is presented. A fast prototyping environment has been used to develop the parking application, and also used as simulator in order to validate the approach. Preliminary results from simulation and real experimentation show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.