If you happen to be flying out of Düsseldorf Airport soon, you might be pleased to discover that there is a new “employee” there who will make your parking experience much more pleasant. Ray is a robotic car parking concierge system invented by Serva Transport Systems to eliminate the headaches that come from both parking your car at the airport and picking it up when you come home.

When you arrive at the airport, Ray takes a scan of your vehicle and stores a 3D profile of its size. It then gently lifts the car via forklift-like platforms and moves it to an available parking spot. Because the parking lot doesn’t need to accommodate human drivers with their sloppy parking and careless door opening, twice as many cars can be packed into the same area.

The Ray system is smart enough to arrange the cars’ parking positions by the return date of the cars’ owners. Those arriving at the airport soonest will have their cars parked near the front of the lot so they are quickly and easily accessible. The system keeps track of your flight so when you walk out of the terminal your car is sitting there waiting for you.

If you decide to hang around in the airport for a while (or if you’re stuck in customs or other such nonsense), you can use a special app to tell Ray to chill for a while and leave your car where it is until you’re ready to get it. (The video above is in German, but you can see the system in use.)

Even if you’re the kind of driver who considers your car a prized possession, Serva Transport claims that their system is unfailingly gentle on vehicles. The integrated sensors and radar guidance systems ensure that you’ll never leave the airport to find a nasty dent or scratch on your car.

Unlike other robotics-based parking systems, Ray can be installed in a regular parking lot with no special infrastructure required. The robots roll along autonomously on the pavement using laser guidance, not metal tracks or chains. As such, an existing parking garage can easily and inexpensively be converted. The system is currently being tested at Düsseldorf. After testing and feedback from users, Serva and the airport will decide whether to expand the program.

The post Ray Wants to Park Your Car: Dusseldorf’s Robotic Valet first appeared on Gajitz.

Not all inventions are life-changers, but some of them are so simply clever that you can’t help but admire the ingenuity that went into creating them. Such is the case with the Morella, a simple little piece of plastic that means you can walk around outdoors, in the rain or snow, while carrying a drink or two and still have a free hand left over.

The idea for the Morella came to the inventor, Ross, when he was in a pub in Wales and needed to step outside to make a phone call. He didn’t want to leave his drink inside, obviously, so carried it out with him. It was raining, so he tried to balance his drink on a ledge while holding his umbrella with one hand and his phone with the other. He never did get to finish that drink because it fell from the ledge and got smashed to bits. But it wasn’t for nothing; this was his eureka moment.

His invention is simply a cup holder that attaches to the handle of any umbrella. When your boss sends you on a coffee run in the rain, or your friend elects you to go fetch the beers at a festival, or you just really don’t want to carry that searing hot paper cup in the pouring rain, the Morella will be there to help out. The holder has a cool pivot system that ensures your drinks stay upright, even if you change the position of your umbrella. The inventor and his team started a Kickstarter campaign to get the product off the ground and onto umbrella handles in time for Britain’s always-rainy outdoor summer music festivals.

The post Simpler Sipping: Swiveling Drink Holder Keeps Hands Free first appeared on Gajitz.

We don’t go to fancy enough places to use a coat check very often, but we’ve heard they’re a little annoying to use. Engineering student Alyssa Davis has created a concept to make coat checks simple, quick, and painless. Her idea is called ECLIPS, and it will significantly cut down the coat check process.

The main part of the design is a small clip with a numbered rubber stamp on one end. When someone checks a coat, the attendant uses the rubber stamp and invisible ink to stamp the coat’s owner. Then that clip is attached to the coat and hung up.

When the owner of the coat comes back, the attendant shines a UV light to read the stamped number. After the attendant types the number into a tablet, the appropriate clip lights up. The light makes it easy to quickly locate the owner’s coat.

Locations that offer coat checks don’t typically care much about how long the coat check line becomes, so they might not have the motivation to spend money on a system like this. But the student project is brilliant and shows a lot of ingenuity – and could possibly even be put to use in other industries.

The post Light-Up Coat Check System Makes Finding Jackets Simple first appeared on Gajitz.

It’s an emergency we have all encountered at one time or another: hunger strikes, and there’s nothing in the fridge. In the dark ages, you may have gone to the supermarket or even picked up a phone to call for delivery. But this is the future, so we have better, easier ways to handle things like hunger. Things like the automatic pizza delivery button from the Red Tomato Pizzeria in Dubai.

The device is a button that sticks to your fridge with a powerful magnet. When hunger strikes, you just push the button and magic beams (also known as Bluetooth) connect the button to your smartphone, which then shoots your favorite pizza order to the restaurant. If you aren’t lucky enough to live in Dubai, don’t worry – now that technology has made this possible, it seems likely we’ll see it pop up all over the world soon enough.

The post Hunger Game: One-Touch Emergency Pizza Ordering Button first appeared on Gajitz.