It seems that robotic parking structures are the wave of the future, and in many high-rent downtown business districts or high-rise apartment complexes where space is at a premium and parking is absolutely out of control when it comes to the cost, these robotic garages become the perfect solution. Still, today everyone is concerned about energy usage, and everyone is trying to cut back, and become a more green company; thus, reducing their carbon footprint.

So, this presents a Catch-22 as the downtown area real estate becomes more and more valuable, (after this current recessionary crisis in the commercial real estate market) and the costs for parking become a premium. However, one should also understand that robotic parking structures use a lot of hydraulics, and therefore the energy usage, while it is significant, is not nearly as much if you might expect or believe it to be, at least on most of these systems.

When shopping for robotic parking garages, equipment, and structures a company should ask lots of questions such as the energy use per the parking of each individual car and that should be divided by two, because retrieving the car also takes energy. However lifting a car up takes more energy, then bringing it back down, and some robotic systems of this type are engineered in such a way to save money (money = energy in this case) on the return trip.

Therefore, if you are considering an automatic parking system of this type that is fully robotic, then you should shop around, and also consider the construction and equipment costs amortized over a 20 year period, then add in the estimated costs for energy, and divide that up amongst the number of business days. After you do that you'll have a better understanding of the cost structure between the different types of units available. Please consider all this.

****Update: I am advised by Mary Lou DeWynGaert, that there actually is a robotic parking structure company that is different; I wanted to correct a misconception. The automated garages built by Robotic Parking Systems use NO hydraulics. http://www.roboticparking.com/. Indeed, I see some benefits to this too, as when hydraulic lines break the fluid goes everywhere and ruins cars, so this would solve that issue, perhaps of interest?

** Additional Update; The FATA Skyparks system does not utilize hydraulics either and there seems to be a tend occurring here. Martin Mattia writes; "many suppliers are moving away from hydraulics due to their performance characteristics at various temperatures." And he also points out that regenerative energy systems, similar to the concept used in hybrid cars, is becoming more common, although cost is a consideration.

The climate and temperature issue issue is quite a common problem. If you will recall in the aviation sector, the FAA changes the requirements for hydraulic fluid due to environmental concerns, but then nose landing gears were having issues. Remember those wheel wells in aircraft get very cold and are not pressurized, see that issue with hydraulics? Also Sunlite Bus in the California desert was using Hydrogen Fuel cell buses and ran into cooling issues with the already extremely hot coverters. So, temperature does matter regardless of industry; Martin's comments are indeed well founded.

And too his point I'd like to add a comment to the regenerative braking systems, similar systems are now being used at the Ports to offload containers, which is saving vast amounts of energy considering some of these late model cargo ships have 20,000 plus containers on them, think about it. Robotic Parking is innovating, and using what works.

Why not consider robotic parking structures? It only makes sense.



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