A SHENZHEN technology company has, seemingly, come up with a panacea for the millions of drivers across China plagued by the headache of having to hunt around, sometimes for hours, for a parking space in overcrowded cities.

    A smart parking robot called Geta (Get A Car) is the creation of Shenzhen Yee Fung Automation Technology Co. and the brainchild of Wu Hao — the company’s 33-year-old chief executive.

    Wu claims that Geta, launched earlier this year, is the world’s first AGV (automated guided vehicle) robot with laser navigation and a comb-exchange or finger-grid mechanism.

    Like Aladdin’s magic carpet, Geta transports a vehicle by handling it directly from beneath the tires. After parking the vehicle safely into a spot or stall equipped with a specially designed platform that the vehicle can sit on, the auto-navigated robotic dolly leaves on another mission.

    Car owners, thus, don’t have to drive around in the dark garage, stretching their neck to find a vacant slot.

    “Parking will be as simple as leaving vehicles to Geta at the entrance platform and using an application on a mobile phone to retrieve it automatically,” says Wu.

    Zhang Jun, a director of the quality committee of Beijing-based China Parking System Manufacturers Association, believes there’s still a huge gap between available parking lots and demand.

    China is projected to have about 105 million parking spots, heavily outnumbered by some 170 million cars by 2017, according to a report by Shenzhen-based consultancy company Forward Intelligence.

    But, based on the international ratio of the two indicators, which is usually 1:1.4, the country should have 238 million parking spots.

    But, Zhang is worried there’s not enough land to fill the gap, especially in cities with a high population density.

    Therefore, there are huge opportunities for mechanical parking facilities that can provide more parking lots on land of similar size.

    He estimates total sales in the mechanical parking facility industry at about 11.4 billion yuan (US$1.74 billion) for 2015, but the size of the market is about 3 to 10 trillion yuan.

    Wu said its failure rate is less than 0.01 percent, while the accuracy is less than 5 milimeters. “Even if there is any problem, an assistant robot will be assigned by the system.”

    The significance of a smart parking robot is that it can save time and land resources, as car owners have to spend an average of one to two hours in their cars each day, and the robot can save them about 40 minutes.

    The device can also intensively utilize land resources by narrowing down the distance between cars from 2.5 to 2 meters and the width of pathways from 8 to 6 meters, as well as taking out at least two pathways among each four rows of cars, compared with a traditional parking lot.

    Duan Xinfeng, Yee Fung’s vice general manager and chief strategy officer, says the average price of one parking spot equipped with their parking robot is about 60,000 yuan.

    (China Daily)