With rapid population growth and a surge in high rise towers, many of Australia’s inner city regions have seen a marked increase in population density. The demand for off street parking is placing heightened levels of stress on new developments to meet the needs of this growing population.
It is now recognised that the number of parking spaces can dictate the capacity of a building. The inability to achieve desired spaces can often limit the opportunities for new projects to materialise and/or the overall success of a project. Developers, architects, town planners and engineers are actively seeking and employing the best of technologies to advance the design of their projects. Autonomous Car Parking is a key technology to overcome the hurdle of designing a project to its highest potential, while also providing the number of required parking spaces for the optimal number of apartments, maximising the success of the project.
In early 2018 Hercules introduced Australia to the AGV (Automated Guided Vehicle) system which is the newest and most advanced fully autonomous car parking system on the market. Hercules AGV parking systems consists of free roaming, battery operated intelligent robots to manage the storage and retrieval of vehicles. The AGV system is superior in terms of capabilities compared to previous mechanical car parking technologies, in that the AGV system can park vehicles in a unique arrangement that no other mechanical parking system can achieve. These systems are column friendly and vehicles can be parked in any orientation and configuration. This opens new opportunities for projects to take building design to a new level that has never been accomplished previously.
Hercules has teamed up exclusively with ParkPlus USA where the AGV’s are manufactured. These innovative AGV’s are revolutionising car parking systems in Australia and around the world.
Suitable for either small basements with tight footprints and insufficient space to turn or large, open areas to park hundreds of vehicles, the AGV doesn’t require any mechanical guides and operates on a flat surface, reducing material costs and installation times.
The AGV system is the Artificial Intelligence of car parking systems as it learns about the user and its environment. It detects how frequently users park their vehicles as well as peak parking and retrieving times, changing the physical layout of the car park to best match its environment. As the AGV does not have any guides, rails or structure for manoeuvring vehicles, the AGV can decide on the best layout for parking vehicles in the most efficient configuration within the storage area.
In situations where conventional car parking basement designs are taking up too much space or too deep to excavate, employing the AGV system in a new or existing development will maximise parking with minimal space, opening a pathway for new opportunities and successful outcomes.
Future Proof your building designs.
With the rapid uptake of ride sharing services like OLA and UBER and the increasing breakthroughs in the area of fully autonomous vehicles, the amount of private vehicle ownership is forecasted to steadily decline. With it – a reliance on parking space. The ParkPlus AGV parking solution lends itself greatly to the shifting demands of parking. As the building structure to run a system of hundreds of AGV parking spaces is just a large open flat area, should the requirement in ten years’ time drop to only 20 spaces or none, then these areas can easily be converted back into precious and valuable commercial space, extra residential apartments or a mixture of both. The AGV omni-directional robots can simply be picked up and relocated to another property.
