Article · AI translation
IT Home reported on November 10 that parking might be a different experience on your next trip to a Disney park. The Walt Disney Company recently revealed that it is testing a group of AI-powered robotic assistants to help visitors find parking spaces at its crowded resorts.
For many drivers, finding a convenient parking space at a Disney park is no easy task. Even the most patient may find themselves frustrated by crowded parking lots. These robots could therefore come in handy. How Disney plans to keep them from being damaged by unruly drivers, however, remains unknown.
IT Home noted that the robots draw design inspiration from characters in Cars and WALL-E and made their debut at the recent Disney Accelerator Demo Day.
Disney is conducting the test in partnership with robotics company Field AI. Founded in 2023, Field AI has team members from organizations and companies including Google DeepMind, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Nvidia and Tesla.
Although much of the attention in robotics currently focuses on humanoid robots, Disney's parking assistants do not have a humanoid design.
One of the small robots unveiled has a four-wheeled chassis and looks somewhat like the autonomous food delivery robots used in parts of the United States. Its body is painted bright orange with vivid yellow accents, mimicking the colors of a high-visibility vest.
Instead of a conventional car windshield, the robot has a large display with eyes that can turn and eyelids that can move, making it look like the much-loved car characters in Cars.
A sign on top of the robot can change the direction it indicates, guiding drivers toward parking spaces. The robot also has 2 small mechanical arms with red indicator lights that can give vehicles directional guidance, much as airport ground crews guide aircraft into position.
The robots look quite cute, but they are probably costly to build and maintain. With parents often anxiously searching for spaces in parking lots and excited children in the back seat, these parking assistants will inevitably face accidental collisions and may even be deliberately hit by some unruly drivers.
Disney has not yet announced a specific deployment date for the robotic parking assistants, nor has it confirmed that they will ultimately be put into use at its Disney parks.
Although robotic assistants may be less prone to mistakes than human staff when directing parking, the initial purchasing and deployment costs clearly will not be cheap. More concerning is the possibility that those costs could further drive up Disney's already rising ticket prices.