Robotic Parking Systems

Replacing Ramps

Do a little research and you will soon discover something that few people give much thought to — conventional ramp-style car parks are, well … not too smart. Top point of criticism is safety. Not only do car parks bring cars and people into uncomfortable and often dangerous proximity, but they are also an excellent place for thieves, vandals or worse to lurk, just waiting for an unsuspecting motorist to leave their car unattended; or worse, for them to return to their car alone.

A typical Robotic Parking Systems installation can have 100 or more cars in motion at once. NORD provides the required drives.
Drive in, lock your car and go about your business – the automated car park takes care of the rest.
Workers at Robotic Parking Systems’ manufacturing facility in Clearwater, Florida cut, weld and assemble the subsystems in-house before shipping them to the customer’s project site.
The two-stage helical gear unit shown here is just one of the many NORD DRIVESYSTEMS products used in a Robotic Parking System car park.

Waste upon waste

These outdated car parks are also harmful to the environment. A typical four-level car park with 750 parking spaces is responsible for creating 37 tons of tire dust and nearly 4 tons of brake dust each year. These pollutants find their way into the groundwater, air and our lungs. On top of that, there are the millions of miles logged annually as drivers around the world search for spaces in car parks, emitting uncountable tons of exhaust as they go.

Finally, consider all the wasted time. If everyone using a car park loses just ten minutes per visit (an optimistic figure, in many cases) – parking the car, walking to and from the lift or stairs, waiting in line to pay the fee, never mind the tire-screeching time spent looking for a spot and driving up and down seemingly endless ramps – the cost in wasted productivity is enormous. Could the driving public’s time not be better spent elsewhere?

Royce Monteverdi thinks it can. The chief executive officer of Robotic Parking Systems Inc. based in Florida believes that conventional car parks are obsolete. For this reason, he has spent the past 25 years designing and manufacturing a far smarter alternative: automated car parks that look like large vending machines, shuttling cars in and out of storage spaces without a human in sight while the car owners go about their more important business.

One of the products he relies on to get the job done? Helical gear units from NORD DRIVESYSTEMS. “Since 1999, we have been relying exclusively on NORD for our power transmission needs and have never had a failure,” he says.

Valet parking, without the tip

How do Monteverdi’s systems work? For those of us lucky enough to have had a three-level Super Garage for our Matchbox cars as children – the systems operate similarly, except the lift is far larger and there is no cranking.

Parking in a Robotic Parking Systems car park is a simple matter of driving into a space resembling the garage in any suburban home. Get out and lock your car, take a parking card from the nearby kiosk and go about your business as the garage door closes behind you. In your absence, the front of the storage space opens and the floor slides forward, carrying your car into the complex and human-free interior structure. From there it is transported through a series of shuttles, lifts and turntables until it reaches its assigned parking spot, all automatically. When you return hours or days later, just slide your parking card into another kiosk and the process is reversed, delivering your car within three minutes or less to a secure parking space, facing forward, ready to go.

This process is hugely efficient, using roughly half as much space as conventional car parks and just a fraction of the concrete area. There are none of the pollutants or safety concerns described earlier, no more door dents and bumper scratches from neighbouring cars, no more wandering around in a dimly lit ramp trying to remember where you parked your car. And do not worry about power outages: Each automated parking space is equipped with generators and enough fuel to keep the system operational for days.

Bucket brigade

Robotic Parking Systems is not the only manufacturer of such systems, yet Mary Lou DeWynGaert, chief administrative officer at Robotic Parking Systems, explains that theirs is much faster than competing systems and far less prone to failure. Where other automated car park manufacturers rely on “one, two, or maybe three” machines to move the cars into position, Robotic Parking uses a separate motor and NORD helical gear unit to perform each vertical and horizontal motion, which means there could be hundreds of such systems deployed in a large car park.

DeWynGaert explains that this is one reason why the Robotic Parking Systems concept does so well in larger installations, which in their case means having up to 100 cars simultaneously in motion. The company’s first system was completed in 2002. It was a seven-level, 314-space car park in Hoboken, New Jersey, that the New York Times reported about as the first automated parking system in the United States. Since then, Monteverdi and his team have constructed many similar facilities. Their most recent one is a 2,314-space car park boasting a throughput of 425 cars per hour at the Al Jahra Court Complex in Kuwait – the largest in the world according to the Guinness World Records.

Efficient driving

Of course, none of this would be possible without the helical bevel gear units mentioned earlier. Ricky Negrón, district sales manager for NORD DRIVESYSTEMS, explains that the UNICASE™ and two-stage helical bevel gear unit series are compact, yet provide torques of up to 50,000 Nm. The flexible and user-friendly design accommodates a range of mounting needs. They are also extremely robust and able to withstand harsh operating conditions such as those encountered in Kuwait and other parts of the Middle East.

“That's one of the main reasons they selected our gear units,” he says. “Robotic Parking Systems has completed three large installations in Dubai plus this most recent one in Kuwait, and they are committed to delivering fully automatic and functional systems. Conditions are different than here in the US, where, if something goes wrong, you can be on site in a few hours. These car parks require absolute dependability, something that is not always easy to achieve when you are in the middle of the desert. But that’s what we delivered.”

Monteverdi agrees. “Our operating environments are often extreme, and that is why we have equally high and stringent selection criteria for our mechanical and electrical components,” he says. “For example, we expect a gear unit to provide at least 40,000 hours of continued operation. NORD has never failed us in that requirement, which is one reason we have been using their products since the foundation of our company. As a matter of fact, NORD helical gear units are perhaps the champion among all our mechanical components in terms of longevity and reliability. Needless to say, we are quite happy with the NORD products we have implemented into our automated car parks as well as with the business relation in general. NORD is a great company to work with.”