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."

Comments

Great idea!

[CaptainZapp]

They tried such a scheme (alas not quite as sofisticated) in the city of Zurich, Switzerland a few years ago. You parked your car in a lift thingie, left it, acknowledged a sort of EULA in which you certified that you didn't leave life animals in your car and presto! Your car was parked fully automagically.

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.

In my previous job we had one

[MK_CSGuy]

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.

Re:Not very detailed

[Fist! Of! Death!]

Probably a Towers of Hanoi type problem. i.e. economically shifting other parked cars to liberate the one right at the back. Could probably overcome it by intelligent stacking using previous park times for the same number plate etc.
So in short probably no problem from a codiing point of view - reliability of the 'robots' (read moving shelf thingies) is probably the real issue

Re:Not very detailed

[ctr2sprt]

The fastest way to make this system really complicated is go with dynamic parking spot sizes. Then you'd need to figure out the dimensions of every car being parked and remember them, as well as periodically reorder vehicles to reclaim "dead" space. ("The parking garage is getting slow, we'd better run defrag!") This would be a really, really neat system, but it'd have to be perfect or the robot would slam cars into each other if it guessed their sizes wrong. And quite aside from the cost to repair the damaged vehicles (and probably the damaged robot as well), I'd be worried about some drunk kids riding in their cars as they're being parked (hell, I'm sober and I think it'd be pretty cool) and getting decapitated or something. Imagine the lawsuits coming from that one.

You could also make the robots somewhat smart, like we do with elevators, and have them reposition cars intelligently based on when they are statistically more likely to be reclaimed. (At work, the parking garage elevators "park" at the 3rd floor at 7am, then gradually move up toward the 10th floor as the garage fills up.) So statistics may show that most people fall into one of two groups: people who park for about an hour, and people who park for about four hours. The robots could then, during idle time, find the cars which are likely to be recalled soon and move them closer to the entrance. This isn't just a convenience thing: if the robot is fetching a car, it can't put one in the garage, so the faster you can get cars in and out, the more cars (over the course of a day) you can store (and the more money you can make). This would be especially crucial for local events like sports games, where 20k people are all going to be getting their cars at the same time.

Re:I, Robot

[hey!]

Reminds me of the scences from I, Robot that showed the immense automated car storage system.

It's kind of like when you see a Edwardian engraving depicting life a hundred years in the future. They'll show advances that haven't happened yet (e.g. everybody flying around in their own personal dirigibles), but miss other ones. 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. It's like the dawn of radio: people missed the possibility of broadcast or person to person communication. They thought you or your servant would go to the telegraph office to send and receive your messages.

More parking spots = Longer lines

[lake2112]

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.

Re:Not Really New

[Midnight Thunder]

Am I the only one who really wants to leave a video camera running a car to catch all the inner workings of the garage? Watching your car whirl around above masses of others would be like porn to me.

Here is a link: AutoMotion Parking Systems Video

Get one that has an automated car wash, too!

[Behrooz]

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!