Hitachi’s EMIEW3 robot is designed to assist people in stores and public places and is fluent in several languages. (via Hitachi)
Like it or not, robots are becoming an integral part of society and the workforce. They are already employed as teachers in some schools, work as care-givers and are manufacturers working alongside humans. So why not utilize them for public assistants of sorts, after all, they can be programmed with a wealth of knowledge to handle almost any task. To see if that notion could become a reality, Tokyo’s Haneda airport is running a pilot program (or Proof of Concept tests) designed to assist passengers using Hitachi’s EMIEW3 autonomous robot.
More specifically, they are there to provide information and assistance (in Japanese or English) to arriving passengers at Terminal 2 in an effort to help them navigate the international airport and its facilities more efficiently.
The EMIEW3 will help passengers using an information display and will even guide them to their destination within the airport. (via Hitachi)
During a demonstration of the robot’s capabilities at the airport, a female passenger asked an EMIEW3 at an information center where the foreign exchange office was located. It then proceeded to show her on a digital display where it was located and then called over another robot to guide her there physically.
The EMIEW3 (Excellent Mobility and Interactive Existence as Workmate) is the third-generation in Hitachi’s assistant robot line and is different from most robots in that it uses an IT platform for its brain. That IT platform is connected to the Cloud and can handle multiple robots, providing separate instructions for each if the need arises. Using the Cloud is ingenious in the fact that developers and operators can assign different tasks on the fly without the need to reprogram each individual robot, making it a very efficient system.
Hitachi’s EMIEW3 pilot program is undergoing three PoC tests beginning with greeting passengers and answering their questions using verbal speech and media from an information display. The second step will have the robot guide them to the display if the passenger isn’t near it and the third step involves it leading the passenger to their destination while also providing additional information.
It will be interesting to see what the test results will produce as the EMIEW3 is set to hit the market sometime in 2018, giving Hitachi over a year to refine their robotic platform. If the tests prove successful, we could see the robots in many other locations as well including libraries, hospitals, shopping malls, parks and sports arenas in the not-so-distant future.
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