Hyundai Motor Group to pilot parking robots at apartment complex

Hyundai Motor, Hyundai Wia, Hyundai E&C form consortium

Pilot to run at Hillstate The Wave City in Siheung

Parking capacity expected to rise up to 50%; safety risks to fall

A Hyundai Wia parking robot. [Provided by Hyundai Wia]

A consortium of Hyundai Motor, Hyundai Wia and Hyundai E&C is set to launch South Korea's first parking robot pilot program at an apartment complex. The technology is designed to ease chronic parking shortages and reduce accidents, and the consortium plans to use the pilot to verify the system's stability, space efficiency and user convenience.

Hyundai Motor Group announced Monday that it will conduct the pilot at Hillstate The Wave City, a residential complex in Siheung, Gyeonggi Province. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport approved the project and provided government funding through the Smart City Regulatory Sandbox as a designated smart demonstration project.

Through the pilot, the group aims to validate how robot-based smart parking technology can address parking shortages, congestion and safety hazards common in apartment complexes. Drivers searching for empty spaces on their own waste time and keep engines idling, while the mixing of vehicle and pedestrian traffic creates accident risks. The pilot was designed to tackle these problems using robotics and to establish a smart parking operating model suited to residential settings.

The demonstration will take place in a dedicated zone of 53 parking spaces on the first below-ground floor of Hillstate The Wave City, using two sets of Hyundai Wia parking robots. Each robot consists of a pair of thin, flat units — just 110 millimeters thick — that slide under a vehicle, lift its wheels and transport it to an available space.

A rendering of Hyundai E&C's Hillstate The Wave City. [Provided by Hyundai Motor Group]

The robots use onboard LiDAR sensors to precisely detect the size and position of a vehicle's wheels before lifting it, and are designed to autonomously park SUVs weighing up to 3.4 metric tons at speeds of up to 1.2 meters per second. Because they can move in all four directions, they can maneuver vehicles even in tight spaces where conventional parking is difficult, allowing more spaces to be fitted into the same floor area.

A driver drops off their vehicle at a designated entry and exit zone inside the complex and requests retrieval via a kiosk or the apartment's wall-pad terminal. A parking robot then slides under the car, detects and lifts the tires, and carries the vehicle to an empty space automatically.

Hyundai Motor Group expects this approach to cut the time drivers spend searching for spaces and to increase parking capacity by between 20 and 50 percent compared with conventional layouts of the same size. Separating vehicle and pedestrian traffic is also expected to lower the risk of accidents inside parking facilities, while minimizing unnecessary vehicle movement should reduce carbon emissions and fine-dust pollution.

During the pilot, the group will measure per-vehicle entry and exit times, actual user wait times, parking success rates, robot operation rates, monthly transaction volumes and improvements in space efficiency. The data will be used to refine proposals for revising laws and regulations governing parking robots, and to build simulation models applicable to a range of parking layouts — residential, commercial, office, transit hub, public and cultural facilities.

The group plans to use those models to calculate the optimal number of parking spaces and robots for each building type and parking configuration, factoring in average wait times, throughput and operation rates. From a smart-city perspective, it also intends to quantify the impact on traffic flow, space utilization, user experience, safety and economic returns.

"This parking robot pilot at a residential complex is an important step toward building a new parking paradigm for the smart-city era, going beyond simple technology verification," a Hyundai Motor Group official said. "By comprehensively verifying the operational stability, efficiency and user convenience of parking robots in a real residential environment, we plan to develop a standard model that can be expanded to diverse urban spaces at home and abroad."

eyre@heraldcorp.com