The Future Of Parking Lots With The Amazing Robot

As technology improves, a lot of carmakers are implementing new and innovative ways to change the way your car works. Some carmakers have come up with the “self-parking” function to help people who are terrible parkers get their car safely into a parking spot. But one French startup took a whole other approach to the “self-parking” feature.

Meet Stan, the brainchild of Stanley Robotics.

The idea behind Stan is that it is a little robot tug that tows your car around a parking lot and decides where to park it. The company says that in a standard parking lot, and that one single Stan could create 50 percent more parking spaces by placing cars more efficiently.

How Stan works is that a human driver pulls into a parking stall and sets their car upon a kind of towable platform. One they take off, Stan comes along. It hooks onto the platform and tows the car to a different part of the lot, packing it in tightly beside a bunch of other vehicles. While Stanley Robotics’ website does not offer any specs of Stan, it is clear these robots will be pretty hefty in size, being capable of pulling a car up to 20 feet in length and handling a 3-ton load.

The company also says that a Stan robot could reduce "CO2 emissions by eliminating passenger vehicle traffic in parking lots." Stanley Robotics has been awarded the Airport Carbon Accreditation, meaning that it offsets emissions within the airport itself.

"We are proud to be leading this operation with Aéroports de Lyon, and to be able to present to the world, for the first time, the operation of Stanley Robotics' outdoor valet robot service," says Clément Boussard, CEO of Stanley Robotics. "We have designed the service to be the simplest and most enjoyable experience for the users.”

Stan sounds like an absolute treat, but Stanley Robotics is currently restricting its testing phase in a parking lot of the Lyon Airport in France. The airport has dedicated almost 500 parking space for the testing, with four Stans on standby to pull the cars in and out of parking spots. The price is set at €52.20 (around RM243), which is roughly the same price as a regular week of parking at the airport. If the test is a success, Stanley Robotics is looking to expand to 6,000 parking spots at the airport.

We’re really looking forward to seeing more of Stan. We definitely will need some Stans in some of our malls in Malaysia! What do you think? Leave a comment below!