It all depends on whether the human or the robot is more helpful! Customers would like their services performed with comfort and satisfaction or issues to be settled seamlessly and as soon as possible. Customers switching services is a loss for both, the Brand and its business. Read through some of the customer services that robots have in store.
Customer service Robots
A service robot for professional use is usually operated by a properly trained person who can start, monitor and stop the intended operation of the robot
1. Hospitality
Henn-na Hotel, Tokyo-Japan (the name meaning ‘strange’ in Japanese) is the first hotel in the world to have a staff team entirely made up of robots.
Front office robot
Guests are greeted at the front desk by a female humanoid in English/Japanese. The robot carries a chest panel for entries from the guest
Cloakroom Robot
A glass-enclosed robot arm is used as a locker system. This robot locker room accepts, safely stores and returns the belongings to the guests
Robot Porter.
This robot is activated with a key card, uses autonomous technology to take guests and their luggage to their respective rooms
Room service robots
AURA at M Social Hotel in Singapore delivers items like toiletries, towels etc and packed meals, water bottles etc to guestrooms. It can ride elevators, navigate to rooms and announce its arrival by calling the room’s phone
2. Restaurant Robots
Waiter Robots
At the ‘Robot theme restaurant’ in Chennai-India, four, wheeled, robots deliver food from the kitchen to the guest’s table (customers have to pick up the food).The position of the tables are keyed in during the kitchen pick up.
Automated Robotic Kitchen
Moley Robotic Kitchen-UK with robot chefs. This automated, fundamentally featured kitchen consists of two fully articulated robot arms, some duties of a personal chef and appliances like an oven, hob, dishwasher, fridge and a touch screen for customer request activation. The kitchen is equipped with glass screens that close the kitchen space while the robot is cooking and use of food processors instead of kitchen knives for chopping, ensuring safety.
The robot chefs would make life a lot easier and more efficient for the businesses like hotels, hospitals, restaurants and individuals
3. Healthcare Robots
Guide robots-PEPPER, at the AZ Damiaan hospital in Ostend, Belgium can accompany visitors to the department they are looking for.
Robot Nursing assistant-Japanese robot called RIBA (Robot for Interactive Body Assistance) can lift up or set down a patient from or to a bed or wheelchair and also move them to another location. RIBA has strong arms with advanced tactile sensors that prevent slipping and can lift upto 135 lbs. It is also equipped with two cameras and two microphones so it can follow cues from an operator
Robot Assisted Surgery -Orthopedic
The MAKO Tactile Guidance SystemTM (TGSTM) is a surgeon-interactive robotic arm system that controls surgeons’ movements through the use of tactile resistance technology. Based on pre –operative imaging, a computer generated 3D visualization surface is obtained of the patient’s affected area .This guides the surgeon and his robotic arm assistant along their planned path of operation and can spare complex tissues or make bone conserving cuts.
4. Retail Robots
Pick up robots CHLOE from PaR systems retrieves products from the shelves. Consumer electronics retailer Best Buy employs CHLOE in its store at Chelsea in New York
“Some Future Robots at concept stage”
The advent of machine learning makes robots smarter and more lifelike.
The TASER Robot created by the ‘informatics’ department of Hamburg University is helping researchers to develop other robots that can grasp objects, operate light switches or open a door. With most robots, either the whole platform moves or their arms move, not both at once. But the TASER robot can move itself and its arms at the same time.
Quirl Window Cleaning robot.
A truly great breakthrough, for the designers, at the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation, IPA in Stuttgart. It moves vertically as a unit, along glass, and cleans the windows as it goes along. Quirl is slated to be of post card size and weigh 600 grams. It can clean solar panels which work much more effectively when they are clean.
Assistive robots for tetraplegic patient
James robot butler was developed by the Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems Lab at the Orebro University Sweden is working on an Ecology of Physically Embedded Intelligent Systems (PEIS).This robotic arm can negotiate its way around obstacles and can grasp objects. Researchers are investigating the options which could lead to the development of Assistive robots for tetraplegic* patients (*Paralysis caused by illness or injury that results in the partial or total loss of use of all four limbs and torso)
Public Relations Robot
Robot JIA JIA , developed at the University of Science and Technology of China, is a human resembling robot which can speak, show micro-expressions, move its lips, and move its body.
5. Military/Disaster Management robot
Robot Atlas Google-owned Boston Robotics, USA has developed the remarkable and frankly terrifying humanoid bipedal Robot Atlas. It is designed to manoeuvre tricky terrain and carry out tasks like lifting and carrying boxes.
Dual-Arm Robot
Hitachi had developed the autonomous mobile (commercially available industrial arms), dual-arm robot in 2015. This dual-arm robot has a mobile platform with a height-adjustable lift mounted on it and the arms are fitted with specialized grippers for picking and secure grasping. The robot has sensors to determine its own position and the position of products. It can move, find, and pick up products it has been looking for. It can also perform coordinated operations using both arms simultaneously to accomplish tasks such as pulling out a case from a shelf and picking a plastic bottle out of the case. It can even pick out a product and place it in a box being held by the other arm, or pick up a box using two arms to support it from the side and below.
But will this conventional dual arm robot suffice for large warehouse operations?
Warehouses stock an array of items varying in size, shape, weight, stiffness, etc. With what degree of flexibility will the robotic arm ‘grasp’ such a variety of items? Basis a customer’s order, how efficiently will the robot pick items from within a range of items, how fast will they pick up and how reliably will they pick the correct item ordered? Robotics research is still building on the deep expertise across machine learning, algorithm optimization, vision, and hardware design etc to meet such a scenario. Commercial availability of such dual arms warehouse robots has not been announced yet.
As technology improves and as prices fall, professional service robots are increasingly doing jobs formerly handled by human workers. Unstructured environments are still a problem for the robot, which is why it cannot be used in households yet. This is mainly a software problem. Robots will be a common aspect of life in future. Maybe on a weekend, at home, watching your favourite TV show you may not bother about the robot that is cleaning the windows!
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Randi
February 8, 2018That’s more than senslbie! That’s a great post!