HL Robotics wants to establish parking robots from Stanley Robotics worldwide

The South Korean robotics company HL Robotics, part of the industrial conglomerate HL Holdings, is acquiring 74.1 percent of the French specialist for autonomous parking robots Stanley Robotics. The deal, worth around 24 million US dollars, should soon pay off, as HL Robotics plans to market Stanley Robotics' parking robots worldwide.

The transaction is expected to be completed in December. The remaining shares in Stanley Robotics will remain with the company. HL Robotics then intends to commercialize the Stan autonomous parking robot worldwide and deploy them in parking lots. The global market is expected to be quite large. By 2030, the volume is expected to be 6.7 billion dollars – driven by the lack of space and higher vehicle density in large cities, for example, as HL Robotics writes in a press release. The company now wants to secure a slice of this pie.

Stan is at the heart of the autonomous parking system. The parking robot is equipped with all kinds of sensors, such as lidar, cameras and ultrasonic sensors, which enable the robot to park vehicles safely and autonomously.

A vehicle to be parked is parked in a closed parking box in a defined position. The automatic parking process is triggered by the vehicle owner using a smartphone app. The Stan parking robot navigates independently to the box and drives under the vehicle using a lifting system. Only the tires are touched and vehicles weighing up to 2.6 tons are lifted. The robot then drives the vehicle to a free parking slot in a parking lot, taking into account the width and length of the car, and parks it there. Stan can move around seven cars per hour. A four-hour charge is sufficient for around 20 hours of operation. Stan then returns the car to the parking box when it is picked up via the app.

Worldwide customer acquisition planned

So far, however, Stanley Robotics' parking robots are not particularly widespread and are largely concentrated on the company's French home market. The parking robots have been in use at Lyon-Saint-Exupéry Airport in France since 2019. Stanley Robotics signed another contract with the Canadian National Railway Company in September – the first commercialization of parking robots in North America.

HL Robotics is now hoping to build on this and sees further potential customers in the USA, Canada and Europe. The company is initially targeting railroad station and airport operators, which are said to have the greatest potential. In addition to further commercialization, HL Robotics also has other tasks ahead of it. For example, the company wants to drive forward the further development of autonomous parking robot technology. Expectations are high: the technology is set to become a new growth driver for the HL Group.

(olb)