By Jim Pinto

One of the worst things about having a car is parking it. In busy downtown areas, parking garages are most often crowded and dark and choke you with exhaust emissions.

The first mechanical garage in the U.S built in Cincinnati in 1932, accommodated nearly 400 cars and used a converted elevator system to hoist individual vehicles from a central receiving area to one of its 24 floors. Once at the appropriate floor, dollies or a live attendant pushed the vehicle into its parking space. This garage operated every day until it closed in 1979. Most of these early garages had to go so developers could make room for new buildings.

In the future, robots will do the dirty work, thanks to automated parking systems such as those developed in Germany by Klaus Parking Systems and in the U.S. by Robotic Parking Systems.

Fully automated garages offer computer-controlled parking and space-efficient stacking, which can fit twice as many vehicles as a conventional garage. Robotic parking systems accommodate from 200 to 5,000 cars, which go on pallets. The pallets then shift into tight positions mechanically, rather than having drivers maneuver cars into parking spots. The technique is similar to raising and lowering aircraft to different levels on a carrier. The flexible, modular design allows applications above ground, underground, inside a building, on top of a building, or under a building, on a wide variety of lot sizes.