So I'll have to park my car in a garage first, then take a bus to the terminal just so that a robot can move my car from the place where I parked it to a different place? I was hoping it'd be something where I'd pull up to the curb, grab my bags and head in while the robot parked the car for me but apparently I'll still have to take a bus to the terminal?
Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense if you can't pull up close to the terminal and leave your car there for the robot to park. But I assume this is just a prototype or trial of the robot tech with a view to expanding it in the future. Presumably they didn't want the risk of broken down (or stuck/confused) parking robots clogging up the busy airport drop off area.
Exactly, i think this product is solving an airport problem and not a user problem. Whenever i park at an airport i always look for the shortest distance to terminal / price, then chose an option that lands within an acceptable range. Unless i'm way for very long shuttle-bus isn't really on the table.
Sometimes airport parking is insanely expensive (cough Schipol), so I'll park further away anyway or park somewhere I can get the train. If this helped lower costs I'd be fine with this but probably they'd keep the high price anyway.
It's still an impressive engineering feat, and (probably, given recent AI advances) an incredible time to market. I wonder when they started working on this, how big their company is, how much training data they put into it, etc.
It's probably got some AI but not the GPU gobbling kind. This is old school robotics using control loops and old AI algorithms. Sensors decide if you've parked correctly in the garage. Robot is dispatched via a queue once you've closed the door. Cameras and sensors guide the dolly into place. Robot follows predetermined route to the parking spot and uses sensors to detect obstructions (people, debris, other robots parking cars). Maybe there's lidar on board. Cameras and encoders guide the car perfectly into the designated spot. Robot whisks off to go charge or grab another car from the queue. It's effectively the same level of intelligence as a Roomba with the mechanics of an electric forklift. It's still cool but the fundamentals were developed 40+ years ago, we've just managed to shrink a lot of the tech down in size and power since then.
Isn't this just automated valet parking? Valet parking allows more efficient use of space, which makes it cheaper in places where space is at a premium. Automating it would change that tradeoff in a way that benefits the customer.
It's missing the value-add of valet parking - being able to pull up at the front door and walk away from your car. Without that, this is not valet anything. You still park then shuttle to the airport so there's zero benefit to the end user.
On the other hand, it leaves the car locked the whole time, no valet having your keys, no valet adjusting your seats, etc. Some of us avoid valet for some of these reasons.
If this thing could pick up my car from curbside at arrivals dropoff like a valet, but handle it robotically so there's no valet downside, it would be amazing.
In some places, it's no more convenient, and the value-add is just that you can pack cars in tighter. In Manhattan, for example, it's common for valet parking to be cheaper and less convenient.
I look for most spacious parking place with wide approach lanes, then shortest distance. Some car parks at the airports are just ridiculous. So narrow you can't exit the car.
Implementation is everything. If there’s enough capacity to drive up and drop your car off without queueing, and your car is ready to go as you leave the terminal then it sounds great. If there’s a half hour wait to get into the drop off zone, and another half hour wait after picking up your bags, and a half hour walk to the pickup/dropoff area then I’d prefer a 30 min shuttle.
Think of it as picking the parking garage or lot you like, but skipping the hunt for an open spot.
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.
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.
I will give you a reason why this might be useful. Not at Gatwick. (I always took the train when I lived in that area and usually ended up at Heathrow or Stanstead anyway). But at Raleigh NC for example, you have to go up 5 levels to find a spot, (I have never seen an open spot on levels 1-4) and spend about 10 minutes or more finding a spot after that, then walking from your spot to the elevator, then back out. Or sometimes the lot is filled up, and you have to drive to a lot far away, then spend even longer finding a spot that will be at the far end of the lot, then walking a good distance to the bus terminal.
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)
I wonder how many people will forget to roll up their windows because they parked in a garage, then the robot leaves the car outside for a week, then the owner comes back to find the car back in the garage but inexplicably soggy and full of mold.
Does the process have a check for forgotten windows?
I guess we can add this to the ever-growing list of extremely expensive, complicated, inefficient and convoluted solutions to problems that end with the final specification: "but it can't be a train".
My company used to cover a car service for us (limo), my door to the terminal.
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.
Yeah because I want to haul all my luggage on a train journey when I go to the airport. I’ll take a train to a lot of places but the airport is not one of them.
Easier to haul my luggage on a train designed for that purpose than take a car and spend longer parking it than the entire train journey. I live 10 minutes from Gatwick, have never driven there, and don’t understand why anyone would want to if there’s any alternative.
I drive an EV powered by my own solar panels. I’ve done my part and frankly don’t much like public transport unless I’m specifically looking to be in the hubbub which is mostly on the weekends when I’m socializing.
I am quite surprised by the amount of negative comments here. My immediate reaction after watching the video is that this is pretty cool and I want to try it, even though I expect issues given that it is the first service of this kind in London.
Personally I wonder why didn't they put several Pater Noster parking machines instead.
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.
I always wonder with solutions like these how stuff like alarm systems on the car cope with the car being lifted, the vibrations encountered as its being towed.
Unless they tell you to switch the alarm system off I guess.
I don't think car alarms detect these kinds of vibrations. It's specifically tilt and more impactful stuff. Certainly, the alarm is never going off when I get my car back via the lifts that I've used. It's probably too smooth.
The problem will be aftermarket car alarms. There used to be a car that parked on the street near my apartment that would go off ever time a bus went by it.
As a general rule, you should take the train to Gatwick if you can, but this is reasonably priced and next time I'm flying from Gatwick I'll probably drive and do this - the train route for me is a bit fiddly, and the worst bit of any London airport for a local is long-stay parking. I'm much closer to Heathrow but the flights from LGW are so much cheaper, it more than covers two weeks of parking at this price.
I never thought about this, can you steal cars by lifting them like that in the air? Not that I think that will happen, but it would be really funny to hack such a robot and just collect cars around
This technique is frequently used by towing companies impounding cars and reposession agents collecting cars for loan defaults - absolutely you can pick up and take a car away with the right hardware.
Just for most people a stolen locked car isn’t really of much uses.
It's quite reasonably priced too (for airport parking), about £80 a week booking for September today. I paid that for short stay parking at Stansted earlier this summer.
That is pretty good pricing. I’m surprised. I wonder if this is just introductory pricing. It seems like there’s not much throughput for something like this. I can’t see how this could handle a constant stream of people wanting to park their cars.
> It seems like there’s not much throughput for something like this. I can’t see how this could handle a constant stream of people wanting to park their cars.
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.
It's not quite clear from the video but it looks to me like you park up in the garage, and there's a garage door on the other side. So as you 'check in', I guess the 'human' side you drove in on, that door closes, and then the other side opens for the robots to collect the car which I'm guessing is also where the car storage is.
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)
You could pack the cars so close together that no one could get into them. Could be seen as a bit of a theft deterrent, although I’m sure the car park itself is pretty secure.
I'd be curious how it handles someone parking poorly in that bay e.g. diagonally. Presumably those lines serve as a parking guide and the door won't close unless you park correctly.
The local car wash has lights that help you park the car pretty precisely under the wash robot. No rails or anything, you park right underneath the robot and it moves around and over the car. The robot doesn't start until you are in position.
IMO this would be a terrible idea to let the robots park cars in the same car park as humans. They most likely have a dedicated car park for this where ever car is parked by a robot.
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."
I think the OP was talking about humans parking weirdly in the garage the robot picks them up from, not the car park itself—the car park itself is robot only (so they can jam cars together).
Of all the airports to do it at in the UK this is probably the one that doesn’t need it. Parking at Gatwick is a breeze, lots of options close and far from the airport and quite reasonably priced. Now Luton, that’s another story.
A sci-fi dream i have is that cars and their engines decouple. That you just own a shell, an egg, and the town owns all the engines. (This dream also includes warehouses and delivery robots of many sizes owned by the town too).
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.
I wonder what the failure mode for something like this is (e.g. in bad weather, after a power cut, a car catches fire, etc). Nobody in the country with keys, cars parked so close together you probably couldn't get in anyway... could be interesting!
BEV thermal runaway fires are certainly not a solved problem. I'm not sure they are as common as some critics suggest, but they are difficult when they happen.
> I'm not sure they are as common as some critics suggest, but they are difficult when they happen.
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.
> The service must be booked in advance. Same-day drive-up parking is not available.
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?
There are systems where you park your car on a moving platform and the whole platform slots into an underground warehouse. That seems simpler and safer.
I remember parking in central London where you left your car in a single space inside a building and it would whisk it up onto some unseen location. I think that was under human control but maybe it will make a comeback with automation.
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.
Where was this? I've only seen it in London at very high end residential places. Even then it's rare. Most privately-owned public car parks in London are dilapidated and full of thieves, but still command premium pricing. It would surprise me if one bothered to build the infra for this.
Honest question, what there is to steal from a car what was left on the parking lot? Especially on an airport where I assume everyone flies off with their luggage and leave nothing or nothing of value behind.
I wouldn't think that should be a problem here if there is any sanity how the system is implemented. With a normal (short stay, long stay) parking lot it is expected that cars leave all the time. A thief breaking into your car and driving off with it, and you getting into your car and driving off with it looks almost the same visually.
Here cars normally leave by a robot picking it up and depositing the vehicle in a garage. Probably there is a vehicle entrance to the parking area for maintenance, but it would be weird to see a car leave through that. Similarly thiefs could cut a hole in the fence and drive through that but again, visually very distinct from a normal operation. Of course it still doesn't help if the security is in on it, but it would be easier to notice that things are askew for a competent security.
So that leaves us with the thieves somehow confusing the digital systems so it dispenses the car to the thieves. And that very much depends on the security of their digital systems.
Hence why I think it would be hard to secure a normal parking lot even when operated competently. But this has the potential if implemented well, to be much more secure.
They are different opportunities for thieves; airport parking has an advantage that the owners are expected to be away for a while, and, if someone is involved in the parking then they know they may be away for lets say 2 weeks. So then the thief thinks if they can steal the car soon after they arrive no one will notice for ~2 weeks by which time it's in a container on the otherside of the world.
Great, now let's (gradually) get rid of all surface parking lots and build hyper-optimized multi-floor parking setups not made for human driving. A sort of Ocado Grocery Warehouse [1] for cars.
I heard horror stories, where "secure storage area" was actually a field without any security. Not saying this is the case here, but one must be mad to give a car like that without knowing exact location it is going.
It's one of the things where I can't see what is there robot's role here.
I doubt the robots have sufficient enough traction/mobility to navigate on any surface that isn't reasonably smooth like tarmac. Also I'd wager the car park the robots go to isn't that far away from the drop off location, most likely on the same land owned by the airport.
What is the name of the company that built this?
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.
If this thing could pick up my car from curbside at arrivals dropoff like a valet, but handle it robotically so there's no valet downside, it would be amazing.
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)
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.
Taxis I understand.
There is both a rational environment choice in that, and a nice feeling of being part of a humming crowd
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.
Most airport parking lots have thousands of spots so you’d need a lot
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.
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.
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.
Here cars normally leave by a robot picking it up and depositing the vehicle in a garage. Probably there is a vehicle entrance to the parking area for maintenance, but it would be weird to see a car leave through that. Similarly thiefs could cut a hole in the fence and drive through that but again, visually very distinct from a normal operation. Of course it still doesn't help if the security is in on it, but it would be easier to notice that things are askew for a competent security.
So that leaves us with the thieves somehow confusing the digital systems so it dispenses the car to the thieves. And that very much depends on the security of their digital systems.
Hence why I think it would be hard to secure a normal parking lot even when operated competently. But this has the potential if implemented well, to be much more secure.
[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.