Automated Bicycle Parking: Robot Vaults and ABB

At some Japanese stations you hand your bike to a machine. You roll it into a gate at street level, tap a card, and a few seconds later it has dropped into a concrete shaft under the pavement. Automated bicycle parking grew out of an old problem: too many bikes and too little room near trains and shops. This post covers how cities stored bikes before robots, the underground ECO Cycle vaults that Giken has installed across Japan and similar systems in Europe, and where ABB robots and mobile robots could fit as bikes get heavier.

The street level entrance of an ECO Cycle underground bicycle parking vault, with its attendant kiosk, in Roppongi, Tokyo, 2016. Photo: Hanonimas / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

How cities stored bikes before robots

Paid, staffed bicycle storage is about as old as mass cycling. In the Netherlands, wooden bike sheds stood at beaches and stations in the early twentieth century; a color slide taken between 1907 and 1930 shows one on the beach at Wijk aan Zee, with people standing in its doorway. In the United States, the first staffed bicycle parking facility opened in Long Beach, California. You paid someone and they watched your bike. Bikes are also compact, since the space needed to park one car can hold close to a dozen bicycles.

A wooden bicycle shed on the beach at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands, color slide from between 1907 and 1930. Photo: Rijksmuseum via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

To fit more bikes into less space, early storerooms used the ceiling. Around 1915 the municipal pawnshop in Amsterdam, the Bank van Lening, kept pawned bicycles over the winter by hanging them from the beams in long rows, as a photo of its storeroom shows. Hooks and two tier racks follow the same idea, and two tier racks fill Dutch station garages today. They are cheap. Someone still has to lift the bike, though, and a big rack area takes up a lot of ground next to a busy station.

Pawned bicycles hung from the ceiling beams for winter storage at Amsterdam's Bank van Lening, around 1915. Photo: unknown photographer / Spaarnestad via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Japanese cities had the problem on a large scale. Commuters ride to stations in great numbers, and bikes ended up parked wherever there was space; a 2006 photo from Ikebukuro in Tokyo shows rows of them along the pavement next to the station. Some cities answered with large automated garages. At Kasai Station in Tokyo, about 9,400 bicycles are parked automatically in a basement 15 meters deep. Each elevator there handles 180 to 190 bikes, and a rider gets a bicycle back in about 23 seconds.

Bicycles parked along the pavement near Ikebukuro Station in Tokyo, 2006. Photo: JunK / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Underground bike vaults in Japan and Europe

The best known robotic system is ECO Cycle from Giken, a company otherwise known for machines that press steel piles into the ground. A cyclist sets the bike at a gate at street level and checks in with a card. A gripper pulls the bike onto a platform, which drops as far as 16 meters and turns inside a cylindrical shaft 8.5 meters across, and a telescopic arm slides the bike onto one of about 200 racks. Igus, which supplies the cable carriers for the lift, says a cycle takes about 13 seconds and that its chains are rated for 4.5 million operating cycles.

The entrance to the underground bicycle parking in Ginza 6-chome, Tokyo, at night, 2017. Photo: Steven Vance / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

On June 1 three underground ECO Cycle units began operating in front of Kobe Station, each with room for 228 bicycles. Two more units are due in fiscal 2027, which will bring the total to 1,092 places. Giken says the system is now installed at 28 locations in Japan, 67 units in all. Europe has tried the idea on a smaller scale. In Zaragoza, Spain, the Biceberg system puts a glass kiosk on the street above a storage chamber for 46 bicycles. Utrecht went the other way: the conventional garage at Utrecht Centraal is, according to Wikipedia, the largest bicycle parking station in the world.

The Biceberg automated bicycle parking kiosk in Plaza San Pedro Nolasco, Zaragoza, Spain, above a chamber for 46 bikes, 2001. Photo: Jezhotwells / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

ABB does not build bike vaults, and we found no source linking its robots to ECO Cycle. The tasks inside one are familiar from factory automation: identify an object, grip it, move it a short distance and store it in a dense rack without damage. Storage that does not need a deep shaft could use autonomous mobile robots such as ABB's Flexley Mover, which navigates with 3D Visual SLAM, to bring racks to a pickup point. The robots in our post on robot valet parking do something similar with cars. For bikes, nobody sells such a system with ABB robots yet.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604, an autonomous mobile robot that navigates with 3D Visual SLAM. Photo: ABB

Where robotic bike storage goes next

Demand for secure parking is growing. On October 2, Momentum Magazine wrote about a Reddit discussion in which many riders said secure bike lockers would make them more likely to cycle to their destinations, especially when a bike has to be left for hours. The article noted that many city residents have nowhere practical to keep a bike at home, a bigger problem with heavy e-bikes and cargo bikes in apartment buildings. Automated vaults deal with theft and space together, and stations and office buildings, such as the Shikoku Bank head office in Japan, keep adding them.

Secure bicycle lockers at Denville station, New Jersey, July 2026. Photo: 4300streetcar / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

For homes and apartment blocks, the next few years probably bring smart lockers and compact automated towers more than deep shafts. For the companies that build these systems, robots could matter in two places. Inside a vault, a handling arm would have to cope with e-bikes much heavier than a city bike, and an arm like the ABB IRB 4600, with versions rated for payloads up to 60 kg, would be one possible choice. Cycle times for a cell like that are normally tested first in RobotStudio.

An ABB IRB 4600 robot in the Orora Fresh Packaging cell in Kingsville, Canada. Photo: ABB

Rack frames and lift parts are ordinary welded steel, work that welding robots and cobots already do in many plants. The harder problems start with cost. Digging a shaft 16 meters deep under a station plaza is expensive, and every lift, gripper and sensor needs maintenance for decades. Size is next: cargo bikes, child seats and wide handlebars may not fit racks designed for standard bicycles. E-bike batteries raise fire safety questions for any closed storage space. Riders also need a fallback when the machine stops, since nobody wants their bike stuck underground at rush hour. For now, most station bikes in Japan and Europe still go into conventional racks and garages.

ABB's GoFa Cobot Arc Welding Package on a welding table. Photo: ABB

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