Park by Robot at London Gatwick Airport(aerospaceglobalnews.com) |
Park by Robot at London Gatwick Airport(aerospaceglobalnews.com) |
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
As always, yes I know this already exists in Japan.
It's one of the things where I can't see what is there robot's role here.
This feels like a clever solution to have some spaces closer to the airport and many spaces further away.
What is the name of the company that built this?
The article says:
> The facility is within walking distance of the South Terminal, although a free shuttle bus is also available.
As these things go, if the service provider is able to make step one work and the airport continues the partnership, an eventual step would indeed be coming closer to or at the terminal, and the robot scooters (sounds a little like scaled-up warehouse robots) would move the car to storage.
Anyway here's where it is:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/YZKPXp7LSjc5jPot5
Turn on satellite view and you can see it is on the edge of the long stay parking. I dunno if you're realistically going to save a lot of time unless your parking space is right at the back of the long stay car park. Worth it if it's free! I assume it's overpriced though.
That's if you know the system, and are aware that you won't find spots on the lower levels, and that the "x spots open" indicators are lying. If you're new, you can spend 30+ minutes on a goose chase, miss your flight etc.
This solves that problem; not the bus one. (If the drop-off location is easy to access; if not, then it's pointless)
Seems like an easier solution would be to fix those availability signs. Surely this is not a problem that a few cameras and some smart software couldn't solve.
Does the process have a check for forgotten windows?
When they set up the AirTrain, I stopped using the car service. It took longer, but I have always had a soft spot for mass transit, and I kind of got a kick out of boarding a train in Huntington, NY, and leaving the train, in Shinagawa.
There is both a rational environment choice in that, and a nice feeling of being part of a humming crowd
Taxis I understand.
Systems with eight slots have decent throughout, the same density as cars parked side-by-side and bumper-to-bumper - even including the space needed to roll out - and are mechanically simple compared to just about anything else in this space.
"If passengers accidentally leave an essential item in the vehicle after drop-off, on-site staff will be available to retrieve emergency items."
But.. how would they get that emergency item if they don't have the keys?
Unless they tell you to switch the alarm system off I guess.
Just for most people a stolen locked car isn’t really of much uses.
Assume your car park is a grid of cars, 20 cars wide and 20 cars long, i.e. 400 parking spaces.
You make the entire first row drop-off/pick up points. With 20 pick up/drop off points you can have a lot of people dropping off or picking up at the same time. And you know pretty well when people will be picking up their cars, as you know their flight arrival details.
Assume your average airport parking customer parks for 5 days, that's 80 arrivals and 80 departures per day. Each of your 20 pick-up/drop-off points only needs to handle 4 pick-ups and 4 drop-offs per day. To me that sounds feasible.
Sort of feels like those videos you see of high tech warehouses where the human workers really only operate on the outskirts of the building, and everything central is completely automated (picking, sorting, storing, inventory etc)
As long as you don't want to use the toilet.
Tom Scott perhaps? Though he will likely get full access to the system.
The article says:
"A Stanley Robotics autonomous parking robot then slides underneath the vehicle, lifts it by its tyres and transports it to a secure storage area."
Which seems to suggest this.
In a funny way, this sort of does that. Sure your car still has an engine but this very much is the car-shell tractor, in practice. This is really neat to see.
I wish them luck. I hope it is reliable enough! It looks pretty straightforwards in how it picks up wheels, which is neat.
That's a solved problem, drench the car in copious amounts of water and flush all oxygen with high pressure CO2 tanks.
Interesting, I wonder if this is just a "Like to be able to see availability and cross-reference data to set individual pricing" or if it's because of a technical limitation, and if so, what could that possibly be?
For example this one is about a van which got stuck in one for two years: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx207jwknp5o
Or there was one in Sweden which trapped cars for 2 months: https://www.mitti.se/nyheter/fnurret-pa-psnurran--m-vill-se-... (sorry, could only find a swedish source)
It is because these kind of systems are complicated bespoke automation. When it breaks down it costs a fortune to fix it. And what can happen is that different parties (operators vs manufacture vs maintainer) gets into a contract dispute to see who is liable to pay to get it fixed. Which as you can guess can take years to play out. Meanwhile your vehicle is stuck and nobody who could is interested in spending a penny on getting it out.
In contrast to that this project is better in two ways. There are multiple robots. (or at least there really should be) So if one breaks down the other robots can still retrieve cars (albeit of course with reduced throughput). And because the storage is just a flat parking lot if all the robots give up the ghost at the same time humans can drive out the cars from the edges of the storage rows.
Indeed, and the usual solution that firefighters choose is to dump copious amounts of water onto the burning vehicle and then drown the carcass into even more water. The biggest issue is that it takes time for the firefighters to arrive - about 10 minutes in Germany by law - and so a fire has quite the time to progress.
Most airport parking lots have thousands of spots so you’d need a lot
> (probably, given recent AI advances) an incredible time to market
Edit: seems like they got bought out in 2024 by HL Robotics: https://en.hlrobotics.co.kr/
This kind of stuff has been the norm literally for decades in any major harbor. No AI BS needed.