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
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
You forgot...
In Soviet Russia, car parks you.
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.
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.
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.
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
Nothing witty
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.
Probably a Towers of Hanoi type problem. i.e. economically shifting other parked cars to liberate the one right at the back.
Oh, great. And when you park the 64th car the Universe ends.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I'm looking forward to Parting Attendant 3.0.
A hairdressing robot?
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
But if it's a virtual impossibility, it must have a finite improbability. Let's work out exactly how improbable, feed that into the drive and give it a cup of really hot tea.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."