My comment about needing to be able to do it with no maps was about driving, not parking. I don't think using the closest public spot to drop passengers off is reasonable. And I don't think you can call your car a robocar if it can't handle driving through the vast majority of parking lots. My comment was definitional. If a car can't figure out how to drive when there are no lane markings, no maps, and essentially no rules, I wouldn't call it a "robocar." "No new infrastructure" is one of the key requirements to be a robocar. https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/vision.html Up-to-date, human-curated, detailed maps of every driveable location on earth is infrastructure.

For parking, I agree, although I think in most instances it won't (and shouldn't) even require a fee. Just for the owner to look at a map and click on which parking spots are allowed. In some cases, if parking is tight, the robocar company might even be the party paying the fee. You say "the owner of the lot either wants robocars...to park there or doesn't." But it's actually not that black and white. The owner may very well want some robocars to park there and others not to. There's going to be competition. A robotaxi company that tries to charge land owners fees in order to park on their land will quickly lose out to other robotaxi companies. That actually goes for drop-off as well, although only the most popular destinations (e.g. stadiums, airports, Disney World) will get away with restricting which robotaxi companies can use their best drop-off locations.

In essence, a robotaxi with passengers in it should be able to go virtually anywhere a taxi can go. That includes being able to drop off those passengers and then proceed safely and relatively courteously to its next destination, whether that be a parking spot or to pick up a new passenger. Not all parking spots need to be fair game, and not even all areas of a parking lot need to be fair game, though practically speaking there likely does need to be parking available somewhere relatively close for all but the most crowded locations. A robotaxi without passengers in it should not drive or park on private land except with permission of the land owner, as necessary to leave an area after dropping someone off, or to pick someone up who has explicitly called it to that location (and the latter only if the land owner does not explicitly prohibit such pick ups).

Also, of course, many cars will have options for someone to take over the wheel in locations that aren't adequately mapped. I don't think you can call such a car a robocar, but it will be extremely useful to have a car/service that can drive autonomously on most public streets and in a few very popular private parking lots, and can drive manually everywhere else.

Later on (or maybe earlier on), I definitely foresee cars with no steering wheels, but which are still operated by humans. A steering wheel is a fairly poor device to provide the sort of human input that not-quite-robocars need. They're mostly an appendage of the days before drive-by-wire. It'll be interesting to see how the law treats such a car.

My hopes that $50 lidar sensors become a reality are not limited to the impact that'll have on driving in parking lots.