New Yorkers will soon have a robotic alternative to the sometimes-surly, lead-footed parking garage attendants who staff the city's garages. Automotion Parking Systems Inc., the North American distributor for Germany's Stolzer Parkhaus, will soon open the city's first fully automated parking garage in a luxury condominium building at 123 Baxter Street.
This robotic garage parks cars without the need for any attendants at all. Instead, motorized pallets will transport the vehicles from an entry-and-exit room to underground storage bays. The system allows 67 cars to be parked within a footprint of 125 x 75 ft. "A conventional parking garage of that size would have room for just 24 cars," says Ari Milstein, AutoMotion's director of planning.
All those cars in such a small space and the elimination of attendants promise attractive economic advantages for parking garage owners. Automated parking systems have started to become popular in other parts of the world. Stolzer Parkhaus alone has built more than 30 automated parking facilities in 11 countries, according to Milstein, who adds that the biggest of these is a 600-car facility in Turkey.
In the U.S., these automated systems have yet to take off. Some of the blame doubtlessly lies with well-publicized accidents and technical glitches at the country's first robotic parking garage, which opened in Hoboken, NJ in 2002. Supplied by Robotic Parking Systems Inc., that automated garage has dropped a Jeep Cherokee and Cadillac DeVille several stories. It also suffered a malfunction that locked cars in the garage for more than a day. Jeff Faria, a spokesman for Robotic Parking, acknowledges those incidents, but he attributes them to human error and technical shortcomings that have been addressed in Robotic Parking's subsequent designs. For example, he says the Cadillac fell from its pallet when the car's keyless entry fob opened the trunk during the parking process. "The trunk caught on a rail and the car was knocked off its pallet," he says. Since that incident, new procedures regarding keyless entry fobs and extra sensors to verify the car's position on the pallets have been added to Robotic Parking's designs, according to Faria. "There have been lots of changes since the Hoboken facility was designed," Faria says.
As for AutoMotion's system, Milstein says "it's impossible that we would have these kinds of problems." He notes that the system is chock full of sensors that determine a car’s position on the pallet at all points during the parking process. Chief among them are an array of laser scanners in the entry-exit room. These monitor a car’s dimensions and position on the pallet — and determine whether any part of the vehicle would interfere with any of the parking equipment or structures. AutoMotion's system continues to monitor the car once it has left the entry-exit room and made its way, via elevator, to the underground storage area. "Storage retrieval units," which combine a pallet with a lift, then carry the cars to storage bays. Milstein says the retrieval units have their own light sensors to monitor any changes in a car's position on the pallet — for example, if a parking brake slipped and the car shifted. Milstein adds that the mechanical design of the pallet also has features, such as sloped edges, to keep the cars in place.
The system has other safety systems built in, including motion sensors that determine whether any human "stowaways" have remained in the car. "The doors to the entry bay can't close with anyone inside," Milstein notes.
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 An automated pallet-and-lift system carries cars to storage bays in New York's first robotic parking garage. |
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