PARKING is increasingly becoming an issue in cities like Shenzhen, with 3.2 million vehicles and only 1 million parking spaces, as land for building parking lots is becoming scarcer and scarcer.

    The parking situation at hospitals is even worse, which has forced government agencies to work out a differentiated parking fare system to relieve the difficulties.

    The situation may have been slightly relieved at Shenzhen Longgang District Maternity and Child Health-care Hospital thanks to the introduction of a robotic automated guided vehicle (AGV) parking system.

    With the help of an omni-directional, battery-powered robot that carries parked cars on self-supported galvanized steel trays in any direction over solid concrete floors, all a driver needs to do is drive the car onto the platform at the entrance of the parking lot.

    “We have won the bid for the hospital parking lot project and started designing a robotic smart parking system for the hospital,” Cai Yingjie, general manager of Shenzhen-based Yeefung Automation Technology Co. Ltd., was quoted as saying in a report on www.sznews.com Thursday.

    The technology was praised by Premier Li Keqiang during his visit to the Mass Innovation and Entrepreneurship Week in Nanshan District last year.

    The robot can transfer a car into a carport in about two minutes. Car owners can also retrieve their cars using the app in about two minutes. As the system is laser-guided and automatically controlled by computers, the discrepancy in location precision in a parking port is less than 5 millimeters. Its features are low land use, high automation, and easy parking and retrieval. The AGV robots can maximize parking space by around 20-40 percent and can simultaneously handle 100 vehicles on its movable platforms.

    The company’s first AGV parking lot was established in October last year near a Metro station in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province to facilitate the transfer of drivers between cars and Metro trains.

    Founded in 2003, Yeefung is one of the leading manufacturers of advanced automatic parking systems in China. It ventured into AGV parking in 2014 and is competing with major competitors in Germany and the U.S.

    (Han Ximin)