Posted by agotterer 11 hours ago
And they say, oh, no, you can come for free if you’re willing to walk 15 minutes to the terminal. No, that’s greed plain and simple.
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.
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.