Nonetheless, the developers of the Chinatown garage are confident with the technology and are counting on it to squeeze 67 cars in an apartment-building basement that would otherwise fit only 24, accomplished by removing a ramp and maneuver space typically required.

A humanoid robot valet won’t be stepping into your car to drive it. Rather, the garage itself does the parking. The driver stops the car on a pallet and gets out. The pallet is then lowered into the innards of the garage and transported to a vacant parking spot by a computer-controlled contraption similar to an elevator that also runs sideways.

[...]

The two loading bays in the Chinatown garage are outfitted with enough laser and radar sensors to make Fort Knox jealous. They sense whether the car fits on the pallet (it’s large enough for medium-sized SUVs) and look for movement to determine whether the driver and passenger have left the car. When the car is properly parked on the pallet, the driver is told to exit the car and leave the bay, and a door closes behind him before the pallet descends into the garage.

When the driver comes back for the car, the underground system goes into motion to retrieve it. Because it parks cars two deep in some slots, it sometimes needs to shuffle cars around to retrieve others. The software figures all that out.

In a touch worthy of Inspector Gadget, an underground turntable turns the car around before it’s lifted to the surface, ensuring that it’s returned facing out into the driveway, eliminating any need to back out of the garage.

One of the funnier sights at this year's CES was a video of a hamster ball. It wasn't any old rodent workout – this one was steering a robot. The hamster seemed to be having fun, and the developer was having a ball too...

Behind it all was iRobot's Create, which takes the familiar Roomba and Scooba cleaners, and turns their common hardware into the core of a robotics development kit. Unlike many other kits, Create is ready to go as soon as you take it out of the box, with the familiar trilobite shape of the Roomba. Instead of a vacuum cleaner, there's a spacious payload bay, with standard fittings so you can add your own hardware to your robot. A fourth, rear, wheel has been added to make sure your creations stay stable.

The basic Create platform comes with 10 built-in demo applications and 32 different sensors you can use in your applications. The basic Create uses iRobot's Open Interface language to build simple applications using the Create's own sensors and motors. Your instructions are assembled on the PC and loaded onto Create via USB.

I suspect this is one for bugshaw, due to the hamster content...