![Click to enlarge Photo by AP/Kathy Willens](/pics/news/15840/roboticparking-2-t.jpg) Photo by AP/Kathy Willens
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Would you trust a robot to park your car? If you're in New York, you may not get the choice.
A new garage opening soon in the Big Apple's Chinatown district is to use a form of robotised pallets to shoehorn 67 cars into an apartment building's basement area that normally would accommodate only 24.
But it doesn't involve a robot actually driving your pride and joy. Instead, you stop the car on a metal pallet which then lowers itself into the bowels of the garage and is shunted into a vacant parking space using computer-controlled technology akin to that used by lifts.
Will it work? It appears there's little reason to doubt the tried and trusted physical machinery but the computers on the other hand -- well, they're computers, driven by software and programmed by humans. And the only other such garage -- also in the US -- has a bit of a chequered past.
In New Jersey, a 2002-built facility with space for 314 cars managed to drop a Cadillac six stories and a Jeep four stories. And last year, a bug meant that no-one could retrieve their car for over 24 hours. Apparently the problems were caused buy faulty sensors, which the owner, Robotic Parking, described a freak accident since two duplicated sensors -- designed so one backs up the other in case of failure -- both failed.
The company reckoned that none of this can happen with the new garage, equipped as it is with laser and radar sensors that check the car fits on the pallet and is properly parked. The system then juggles the cars around underground when the owner wants their car back, even turning it round so it can be driven forwards out of the garage.
There will be more, apparently, with the company building garages in Dubai and several more in the USA.
At least the car's less likely to be nicked -- as long as the operators don't blithely hand the keys to the wrong person...