Slashdot Mirror
Parking Attendant 2.0
theodp writes "Would you trust a robot to park your car? That's the question facing New Yorkers as the city's first robotic parking garage opens in Chinatown. With new software and enough laser and radar sensors to make Fort Knox jealous, it's believed that the new facility — which can squeeze 67 cars in space that would otherwise hold only 24 — will not suffer the kind of glitches that caused the nation's first robotic garage in nearby NJ to drop and trap cars."
... did not trap cars due to technical malfunctions, but rather due to a contractual dispute.
Get me one so my wife can finally park her car normally!
Daxy's Networking Blog
Reminds me of the scences from I, Robot that showed the immense automated car storage system. I'm looking forward to Parting Attendant 3.0.
But does it run linux?
Imagine big parking lot (beowulf cluster) of these.
I, for one, welcome our car throwing, parking overlords.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
This isn't entirely a new idea. Tokyo already has space-efficient parking garages that stack cars using turntables and elevators. I think the images atop this link are fake, but the video appears real and this appears similar to what I saw from outside.
Revive the Constitution.
The parking worked like a charm too. What didn't quite work was the retrieval of your car (which should happen within 120 seconds according to the specs). The city, as the owner of the garage, had to shell out a few nights in a nice hotel until the less lucky owners cars could be retrieved by manual intervention.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
It would be interesting to know a bit more, specifically what were the main difficulties in building the system? It seems very simple - make sure that the car fits into a (virtual) box ( you can do that by first trying to fit it into a real box :-) ), then put the box into a free space.
Wow, theodp really plagiarized the heck with the summary. Why write your own summary when you can just cut and paste? Heck, I can not get 100 Slashdot submissions per hour! It is sad that it is so bloody obvious.
The one in NJ dropped cars? I remember it was shut down with cars inside by a contract dispute.
I don't see the big novelty since there's been a variety of systems in Japan for a dog's age, but this is an American design, at least according to sharply-named Robotic Parking Systems's website. (Which I won't link to, since it has pretty much no actual content and is only missing the Monorail Song.)
Do love this quote from the vendor in TFA: "What seems to have happened is that the developers have been wanting this for a long time, but the architects have been lagging behind. Architects use the same plans over and over, particularly when it comes to parking in a garage."
Riiiiight. Gosh those architects just walk all over developers. More likely it's been uneconomical till now. I guess that was the vendor's way of deflecting attention from what will be hefty sticker shock.
too late... self-parking cars are already available... in Japan...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
which can squeeze 67 cars in space that would otherwise hold only 24
The junk yards have been doing that for years.
just for the pics
company's site
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
"It is a complete virtual impossibility that damage can occur," he said.
- TFA
These automatic parking systems are everywhere in Japan. Especially in the craped city centers, but even many normal apartment buildings have them to cram in a parking spot for each apartment.
Unless they have some sort of multiple entrance system, the planned 900 and 1200 stall lots in the Middle East could sure form some long lines. I wonder if they've perfected their collision detection algorithms...
In my previous job (3 years ago) there was a robotic parking lot - you parked your car inside a garage-sized room and a robotic arm/elevator combo. using electro magnets parked it in the "lot" (if I remember correctly it was a shaft both underground and in the building itself). In the end of the day you put your parking-card thru the card reader and the robotic combo. brought it to the garage-sized room. It saved much space and is really cool. The disadvantages I saw where: :)
a) 17:00 most of the people in the building finished their work. BAM, long line of workers infront of the garage-sized room. Sure, it can be solved with more "terminals" (aka the garage-sized rooms) but this takes more space. Also, altough in regular parking lots there is also a bottle-neck in the exit, I suspect they will usually be faster.
b) in the first few weeks of the system's operation there were two accidents - the robotic arm with the elcetromagnets ripped of their roofs. This was solved with further tuning but needless to say that some people were afraid to put their car into this system
Overall I think such a system is good if there is a space problem, but in terms of costs I really don't know how it compares.
This is hardly news. In Japan, since there's a lack of terrain (making waste of space a pricey luxury) these "robotic" parkings are almost more common that open wide parking lots.
I guess I am already using the next -release, while my wife is only using -unstable.
BA DA BING!
So, what happens when the car above you takes a leak of some essential fluid on your car? Can't imaging that oil/radiator/transmission fluids can be good for the finish.
I can imagine the insurance companies going ape-sh*t.
"How was your car damaged sir?"
"The robot parking it managed to reverse into a bollard"
"Sorry, you're not covered"
Seriously, I can't be far off. Are there insurance cover implications here?
ilovegeorgebush
Those pictures are very real, just the description is wrong:
its in germany, not japan
And its no garage, its a car "storage tower" near a vw plant, where people can "dial" their car, and it gets fetched to them.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
At least, not unless you think an elevator is a robot.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Am I the only one who likes being able to get my car out if the grid is down? In the last major blackout I had to drive home to NYC, the next day I figured if I had no electricity I may as well go camping so I drove to NJ. One fuse blown and my car could be stuck for no good reason.
I, for one, do *not* welcome our new robotic parking overlords.
-- Religion is not an exact science
This is just a new application of automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS). They've been around for quite some time in warehousing applications, particularly for manufacturing and libraries. They're particularly useful when dense storage of a wide variety of items is needed. They can be quite secure since you only have to control access to the user terminal to control what goes in or out. They also are generally very reliable and easy to use.
The downsides? All that automation is pretty expensive. Unless one has fairly specific needs there usually are cheaper and simpler alternatives. There also is the risk of breakdowns and regular maintenance is of course required. Power outages obviously will shut the system down and prevent access. The biggest problem though is that if one isn't careful about data entry regarding where things are stored, doing physical inventory and finding lost items can be a BIG problem. If you say the item is in bin 6A and it's really in bin 7C, there is generally no easy way to find it other than searching bin by bin. Not fun even on a small AS/RS system. RFID and barcoding can help in some cases but it's still a serious challenge.
So, what happens if you left someone in the car? and what happens if you left the car there - do you pay upfront, or when you retrieve it?
Not that I'm in the Mafia, or anything.....
I have a friend who works for a contractor that's been doing a lot of renovations in Hoboken where the first garage is and to this day he say's that the police are there at least once a day because the robot tries to give somebody the wrong car. Parking your $75,000 BMW or Lexus and then having the robot try and give you back a mini cooper can really ruin your day.
Upon retrieval at a cash machine (as in all parking garages here).
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
... automated parking garage and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
to make Fort Knox jealous
You mean Fort Knox and jealous aren't the same person?
Repeat after me: There is no spoon.
Have you read my journal today?
I lived a block away from the Hoboken, NJ garage. Getting your car in the morning or the evening for rush hour usually required at least a 20-30 minute wait. Police were required in the evening to direct traffic around a bunch of cars waiting for a robot to load cars.
I for one, could care less about our new robotic underlings...
These parking garages that stack and rotate cars are all over Taiwan. I've seen small devices on streets that hold a dozen or so cars to very large arrays that hold an estimated hundred cars in the metro areas and for large condo/apartment complexes. Never seen a scrape yet. Of course in Taiwan traffic scratches and scrapes are a fact of life so how can you be sure.
Too lazy to create a sig...
It would seem plausible to me that at some point, they could integrate a car wash into a larger version of these garages. That way, not only do you have the option of parking your car, but you could have the option of getting it washed while not in use. While this could be a totally automated process, I would imagine that there would be a market for subcontracting a manual portering bay in lieu of an automatic system so that other cleaning services (such as an interior vacuum, paste waxing) could be offered. Likewise, another subcontracted bay could offer oil/filter/lube service as well.
It seems to me that if you can integrate other services into something like this, whether automatic or performed by humans, would add to the ROI on something like this.
. I think in a world with robotics so advanced, it is unlikely that anybody will drive -- or be allowed to drive -- a personal automobile, except at the track.
I can't wait. It's a dangerous unproductive waste of time.
They thought you or your servant would go to the telegraph office to send and receive your messages.
This time around we ride in our servants.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The self-parking cars DO save space. You can get out of the car and use your remote to press "park." Thus, you don't need any door space. When you need to get back into the car, you just press the park button again and it backs out of the space. The new BMW 7 has this. The Lexus has auto-park, too, but i'm not sure if it's remote-controlled like the 7-series is.
These park-bots are everywhere in Germany. Many moons ago (1994) my building in Ruesselsheim (Opelstadt!), Germany, had one in the basement.
Dude, my buddy's *apartment complex* in Berkeley had one like 3 years ago. What's this news about?
Sony ha
The first mechanized garage was built in 1932 and ran until 1979. This isn't even the first automated parking garage in New York City. There was one working around 1970.
The layout was well worked out. It looked like a little parking garage with two stalls, with no sign of any machinery. You parked your car and got out. Then, solid barriers rose out of the floor around the car, a big freight elevator door opened behind the car, the pallet on which the car was parked moved into the elevator, the elevator doors closed, and shortly thereafter, an empty pallet was delivered. Then the barriers went back down, leaving an empty parking stall.
Light beams and photocells were used for safety interlocks. The light beams were modulated, so extraneous light wouldn't bother them, and the modulation was at about 5Hz, so you could see this.
Technically, the biggest problem was with limit switches. The system depended on hundreds of mechanical limit switches for position feedback, and they were not reliable enough, so the system could stall. This became worse with wear.
And I for one welcome our new parking overlords.
In a place like that, if that's all he's doing, I might be worrying about job security if I were that guy.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
will not suffer the kind of glitches that caused the nation's first robotic garage in nearby NJ to drop and trap cars.
irobot gone on strike! News at 11.
640 cars per garage should be enough for anyone.
What the hell is this supposed to mean? From TFA:
"It is a complete virtual impossibility that damage can occur," he said.
Yeah, I want THAT guy in charge of the robotic parking system. Ugh...
If I were designing this system, I'd consider charging more to park larger vehicles. There could be different sizes of storage berths, and the laser-wielding robot would measure your car and charge you for the smallest berth your car would fit into. People who think they need to drive an SUV to work would pay for more cubic meter hours.
If the system is combined with an (optional) automated car wash, they could make even more money! :D Park your car, and it's CLEAN when you get back!
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
This is your wife ?
http://www.eingeparkt.de/zu-grose-parkluecke/
http://www.u-parkit.com/U-parkit makes customised elevtor type systems which you drive on to and a number of cars can then be stacked up its a nice idea for cheap extra storage. No complex robotic systems. They have just started to expand after a number of smaller projects.
If there were a reasonably well working robotic garage next to a traditional garage, I'd probably use the robotic garage if the price was similar.
Why? Because it would spare me the trouble of finding a parking space, finding the pedestrians' exit of the garage and then searching for the car when I return. And I wouldn't need to worry about scratches or burglaries.
where's all that Karma?
class BaseClass{ virtual bool impossibility_of_damage(){return true;) } class ActualClass::BaseClass{ virtual bool impossibility_of_damage(){if((rand()%2)==1) return false; else return true; }
God spoke to me.