Neat!
Posted on 01/29/2007 7:15:59 PM PST by rawhide
Would you trust a robot to park your car? The question will confront New Yorkers in February as the city's first robotic parking opens in Chinatown.
The technology has had a good track record overseas, but the only other public robotic garage in the United States has been troublesome, dropping vehicles and trapping cars because of technical glitches.
Nonetheless, the developers of the Chinatown garage are confident with the technology and are counting on it to squeeze 67 cars in an apartment-building basement that would otherwise fit only 24, accomplished by removing a ramp and maneuver space normally required.
Rather, the garage itself does the parking. The driver stops the car on a pallet and gets out. The pallet is then lowered into the innards of the garage, and transported to a vacant parking space by a computer-controlled contraption similar to an elevator that also runs sideways...
...two loading bays in the Chinatown garage are outfitted with enough laser and radar sensors to make Fort Knox jealous. They sense if the car fits on the pallet (large enough for medium-sized SUVs) and look for movement to determine whether the driver and passenger have left the car. When the car is properly parked on the pallet, the driver is told to exit the car and leave the bay, and a door closes behind him or her before the pallet descends into the garage.
When the driver comes back for the car, the underground system goes into motion to retrieve it. Because it parks cars two deep in some slots, it sometimes needs to shuffle cars around to retrieve others. The software figures all that out.
In a touch worthy of Inspector Gadget, an underground turntable turns the car around before it's lifted to the surface, ensuring that it's returned facing out...
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Neat!
Didn’t know that we had enough Robots to warrant their own garage?
C'mon, rawhide...it's Chinatown. (check fortune cookie before parking)
The robots are just doing jobs Americans won't do.
Yeah, just wait till Americans find out that the robots are having sex with their cars.
Trust your car to the man who wears the star - Bill Gates.
My daughter tells me this is old hat in Jena, Germany, a city in what was formerly East Germany. I don't know how it works, but I know she loves the convenience, especially in the winter.
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