Robots taking over luggage duties at a brand new hotel. I'm rich Demiro and this is rich On Tech. Recently I visited a brand new Chareton hotel that has a unique service, a fleet of robots delivering room service and taking luggage up to guest rooms.
So the robots are from a.
Company named Atheon. They're the tug robot and previously they made a name for themselves in hospitals because these robots are a little bit bigger and they can carry supplies to hospital rooms, things like medicines, towels, all that good stuff. And now this is a first for hotels. So the Sheraton Los Angeles San Gabriel Hotel has seven of these robots on staff, plus one more robot called a Wayfinder robot. So this is a robot that stands in the lobby,
it greets guests. It has a little screen on it and it can walk you to wherever you need to go. So if you want to find the restaurant, you just pop that on the screen and it will walk.
You to the restaurant.
Then these other robots, which are much bigger, they will do all kinds of heavy lifting, so they can take linens around the back of the hotel. They can deliver meals and room service, and also their main duty is bringing luggage to the guest rooms.
So we watched it in action. It's pretty cool.
A real person loads up the luggage onto the robot and then they lock the door, and then the front desk programs in which guest room it's going to. The robot then on its own, uses a combination of sort of indoor GPS and Wi Fi to walk its way to the service elevator, avoiding people in the process. If you stand in front of it, the thing's going to
stop and try to go around you. Then it takes the service elevator up to the room, and once it gets outside your room, it will ring the phone inside your guest room and it will say, hey, I'm outside the front door.
Here's the code.
It'll give you a four digit code to go outside your room and unlock the luggage robot. You pull your luggage out, you bring it into your room, and you're done.
Now you don't have to use this.
They still have regular bell people if you want your luggage brought up to your room that way, or you know, if you need extra help because you do have to take the luggage out of the robot yourself.
Now, if there's someone that walked.
You up to your room, like a bell person, maybe they can stay and help you take the luggage out as well. So I thought it was really cool. It was neat to see these robots in action. They do move pretty fast, so they know their way around the hotel. The entire thing has been mapped by the company so that the robots know their way around. They also have all of the doors equipped with sensors, so the robots
can open the doors all by themselves. You watch them open the elevators, you watch them open all the common doors. They don't open the guest room doors, but perhaps that will happen in a future version of these things.
I'd see that as a possibility for sure.
Now the biggest question is do you tip these robots because someone is loading the luggage into the robot or the food that you get delivered to your room.
So I talked to the hotel.
They said, yeah, you can leave a tip inside the robot's belly, whatever you want to call it, and some human will reach reave that tip and of course split it at the end of the day.
I thought this was really interesting.
It's definitely one of those things where it is a sign of the times.
Our world continues to put more and more robots to work.
And the ironic part about robots is that they're doing a lot of these duties that humans can do super easily, but it takes a whole team of people to program these robots to do even the simplest tasks that any human could be trained to do in just a couple of minutes. If you want to see the video on the robots, be sure to click the link in the description. I've got a full demonstration of how these things work.
They even have a little bow ties on, like kind of like a little tuxedo painted on the front of them. And they're looking to name these things as well.
So check out the video. It's in the description there. And please, if you like this podcast on a daily basis.
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Thanks so much for listening.
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Just go to rich on tech dot TV. I'm Rich Tomorrow and I'll talk to you next time. Bye bye,