New York's first robotic parking garage to open
NEW YORK: 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 its Chinatown district.
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 have confidence in the technology and are counting on it to squeeze 67 cars into an apartment- building basement that would otherwise fit only 24, accomplished by removing a ramp and maneuver space normally required.
A humanoid robot valet won’t be stepping into your car to drive it.
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.
There is no human supervision, but an attendant will be on hand to accept cash and explain the system to baffled humans.
Parking rates will be competitive for New York about $400 monthly or $25 a day, according to Ari Milstein, the director of planning for Automotion Parking Systems, the U.S. subsidiary of Stolzer Parkhaus of Germany, which has built automated garages in several other countries as well as in the United States for residents of a Washington apartment building.
Another company built the garage with the checkered past.
Built in 2002 across the Hudson River from New York in Hoboken, New Jersey, with 314 spaces for monthly rentals only, the garage dropped an unoccupied Cadillac DeVille six floors in 2004 and a Jeep four stories the following year. Early last year, a malfunction that went unrepaired for 26 hours trapped cars inside.
Last summer, Hoboken tried to wrest control of the garage from its builder, Robotic Parking Systems of Clearwater, Florida, and the ensuing court battle shut it down for two weeks, trapping some cars inside. The garage now is closed until Thursday as the city replaces the controlling software, a city spokesman, Bill Campbell, said.
Dennis Clarke, chief operating officer at Robotic Parking, acknowledged the operational problems but said the garage had operated with “99.99 percent efficiency.” He called the 26-hour outage a freak incident, in which two redundant sensors failed at the same time and a maintenance crew failed to follow company policy by not repairing them right away.
The company’s current generation of garages is much improved, Clarke said.
“Software-wise, machinery-wise, everything that has ever given us a problem has been designed out of the system,” he said.