SaviOne robot (AKA A.L.O. Botlr) is programmed to assist the hotel’s concierge. (via Savioke)
Robots were designed to serve humans to perform menial tasks such as vacuuming, building cars or sorting products on conveyors. The last few years have seen them transition into different rolls that are normally performed by humans. We’ve seen them in hospitals ferrying medications, linen and lab samples (Aethon Tugs) or even consoling patients who are terminal (Last Moment Robot). They’ve also been employed to work in various stores, including a campus store at Carnegie Mellon University (AndyVision).
While those are some interesting professions where robots have been employed, they are now being put to use in hotels as an assistant of sorts. Aloft Hotel in Cupertino, California has recently employed Savioke’s SaviOne as the hotels concierge assistant and renamed the bot A.L.O. Botlr (robot butler). The robot is autonomous and features onboard SONAR, LIDR and a Kinect-like 3D camera to navigate the tech-savvy hotels various hallways. The 100-pound robot also features a 7-inch tablet it uses for a face and interaction and has a convenient compartment to carry hotel guest deliveries weighing no more than 2-pounds. It can connect to Wi-Fi and 4G and uses them to inform guests of deliveries by triggering an in-room phone call when it arrives.
Instead of accepting tips for its services (it doesn’t have hands), guests are invited to tweet their approval over the hotels twitter account. Botlr is currently undergoing a trial run at Aloft’s Hotel in Cupertino and if successful at performing its duties, will be adopted by Aloft’s other hotels in several different areas in North America.
It may not be technologically advanced as the Botlr but it can still serve food and cold drinks. 80's TV shows often had them, equipped with a snide attitude, like Iron Man's JARVIS. Those were the days of optimism.
While the Botlr is definitely a great addition for hotel employment and features some innovative technology, it’s by no means the first robotic butler designed to serve humans. The 80’s unleashed a maelstrom of small robots that were designed to carry food, cold drinks or other lightweight objects, such as Playtime’s ‘Steve The Butler’ (pictured above). The robot’s eyes lit up and moves around using a tethered remote control, however you still had to put the food on a tray for him to carry it.
Tomy had a full line of robots with their ‘better-than-Steve’ line of Omnibots. The Omnibot series had a built-in tape deck for playing music, a digital alarm clock and could speak using catchy pre-recorded phrases. They also had a wireless remote control and could be programmed to move on its own based on the location of its cardboard ‘home base’. In fact, Tomy also designed a cleaning robot decades before Roomba hit the market with their Dustbot, which featured a tiny broom and dustpan that it used to sweep dust and dirt into little piles before vacuuming. It’s able to change direction by sensing the edge of its location, which was pretty ingenious at the time. It’s interesting to see how far robots have evolved since that time and even more interesting to see where they are headed as technology advances.
C
See more news at: