Parking Robot Gone Wrong

Every think it might be cool to have a robots take over some of the mundane tasks of life, like parking your car? Sounds good, at least in theory, right? And maybe it is when it works. But if the robot’s software has a glitch, or the owner neglects to renew the software license? Well, then it’s not pretty.

Car Parking RobotThe robot that parks cars at the Garden Street Garage in Hoboken, New Jersey, trapped hundreds of its wards last week for several days. But it wasn’t the technology car owners had to curse, it was the terms of a software license.

The garage is owned by the city; the software, by Robotic Parking of Clearwater, Florida.

In the course of a contract dispute, the city of Hoboken had police escort the Robotic employees from the premises just a few days before the contract between both parties was set to expire. What the city didn’t understand or perhaps concern itself with, is that they sent the company packing with its manuals and the intellectual property rights to the software that made the giant robotic parking structure work.

The Hoboken garage is one of a handful of fully automated parking structures that make more efficient use of space by eliminating ramps and driving lanes, lifting and sliding automobiles into slots and shuffling them as needed. If the robot shuts down, there is no practical way to manually remove parked vehicles.

It took a few days to iron everything while car owners pined for the imprisoned vehicles, but the city and the software company came to an agreement for a three year software license. (If I were a car owner who parked in that garage, I’d mark the date on my calendar.) It’s an amusing story if you didn’t have a car in that garage, but it underscores that with new technology comes issues that earlier adopters — both cities and citizens — may not have fully considered in their rush to embrace the new tech. Sometimes for every old problem solved a new one is created.