Robot garage

Get ready for space-age parking, what vice president of sales with Automotion Parking Systems Jeffrey M. Hyde calls the future of parking structures.

The board of aldermen gave the green light to the Oceanview project on Aug. 23 as they approved a modification to the existing mixed-use, conditional-use permit. Demolition of the Seascape Motel could begin next month, making room for a new residential and commercial building with a state-of-the-art automated parking garage.

The process begins with the driver pulling into the entry-and-exit room, where he will be prompted through computer guidance software to position his car on a pallet. Once the driver is positioned, he is then prompted to get out of the car and take the keys. Then the person would park and swipe a parking card at the automated parking kiosk or receive a card to pay an hourly fee. The kiosk would register who the person is, what time they came in and what their car was.

Once the system approves the car, a door comes down, and then it will move the car horizontally into the system, transferring the car by crane. The crane rotates the car 180 degrees, lifts the car up and then transfers the car from the crane to the parking deck. It rotates the car so the driver can pull out of the position.

“Pulling into the booth is like a one-car parking garage,” Hyde said.

“We can guarantee that no car will ever be damaged.”

This system will be very similar to one already in between Little Italy and Chinatown, New York City, which has a 50-inch plasma screen at the end of the parking deck. There will be very little sound involved, and those living in the high-end condominiums and working in the office space will not hear the automated parking system.

The parking system moves vehicles by crane to the parking deck.
Hyde said the car retrieval time is between 1 ½ and two minutes. The system turnover for vehicles is less than one minute.

There are cutting-edge garages around the world that feature automated parking systems, but the technology is relatively new to the region and untested in a salt-air environment.

“The automated parking is 100 percent the wave of the future,” Hyde said. “There’s been very few things of this nature that will have as profound an effect on real estate development for the next 100 years.”

by Jennifer Roush Thursday, September 6, 2007