Car companies have invested billions of dollars in advanced automated parking solutions to relieve human drivers of the stress of parallel parking or backing up into tight spaces. Some systems have turned out better than others, but unless you’re willing to pay a fair bit extra for such an advanced system, you’re stuck with your own human parking skills. What if there was a way to have your old or cheap car parked automatically, without even having to keep the engine running? Hyundai has developed an ingenious parking robot that can glide under virtually any kind of car, lift its wheels, and then park it perfectly in a designated parking spot. The WIA parking robot consists of flat metal slabs that slide under vehicles to deploy pairs of metallic arms to lift all four wheels, and then park the car better than any human ever could. The robots are equipped with cameras and LiDAR — a remote sensing technology that users laser light to measure distances — and can move at four feet per second to move cars into parking spaces. While there isn’t a specific public release date for Hyundai WIA parking robots in the U.S., they have already been introduced here and are being prepared for larger-scale deployment.
