Hyundai to put parking robots in Korean apartment garage for the first time
Hyundai Motor Group will pilot wheel-lifting parking robots at a Siheung apartment complex to ease garage congestion and fit more cars into limited space.
A Hyundai WIA parking robot is seen under Ioniq 5 EVs, lifting the wheel to move the vehicle around.HYUNDAI WIA
Not every robot stands tall. Two flat slabs barely 11 centimeters (4.3 inches) thick slide under a car, lift the front and rear wheels clear of the ground and carry it off to find an empty space. They move forward, back and sideways with equal ease.
Hyundai Motor Group is about to try that in an apartment garage in what it says is the first such test at a residential complex in Korea.
Hyundai Motor, Hyundai WIA and Hyundai Engineering & Construction (E&C) will run the pilot at Hillstate The Wave City — an apartment complex constructed by Hyundai E&C — in Siheung, Gyeonggi, the group said Monday. The robots were shown publicly in January at CES 2026, the consumer technology show in Las Vegas.
The pilot runs under the smart city regulatory sandbox and was approved for state funding by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. The aim is to test whether robots can ease the shortage of spaces and the congestion that build up in apartment garages.
Hyundai WIA's robots work in pairs. Lidar sensors read the size and position of each wheel so the pair can position itself under the car, and together they can lift an SUV weighing up to 3.4 tons (7,500 pounds) and move it at up to 1.2 meters (3.9 feet) per second.
Two sets of robots will operate in a 53-space parking area on the first basement level. A driver leaves the car in a marked drop-off area and calls a robot using a wall pad, the wall-mounted terminal that controls an apartment's systems, and the robot lifts the car and carries it to a free space.
A Hyundai WIA parking robot is seen under an Ioniq 9 EV, lifting the wheel to move the vehicle aroundHYUNDAI WIA
Hyundai WIA expects the robots to fit 20 to 50 percent more cars into a garage than conventional parking allows. Nothing has to be left open for a driver to swing a door, so cars can be packed tighter. Stacking them two and three deep would raise the number further.
The company has also built its own control system to route the robots along the shortest paths. The version now in use can direct 50 sets at once, and one capable of handling 100 robots is in development.
Over the course of the pilot, Hyundai Motor Group will measure how long each car takes to park and be retrieved, how long users actually wait and how often the robots park successfully. It will also work out the best ratio of spaces to robots for a given garage.
"We plan to verify the parking robot's operational stability, efficiency and user convenience together in a real living environment, and to build a standard model that can spread to a range of spaces," a Hyundai Motor Group spokesperson said.
BY NAM YOON-SEO [cho.yongjun1@joongang.co.kr]
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
