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(CNN) — The little rice robot is on a mission around the corridors of Hong Kong’s Cyberport Innovation Center.
The stocky white cuboid resembles Star Wars’ R2D2 robot in its construction, but has the wide-eyed expression of Pixar’s WALL-E. HFT Life Cafe is serving drinks to customers in a “head” room that is opened by the customer using a PIN code sent to their phone.
Customers receive a pin code that allows them to open a hatch in the rice “head” to retrieve their drinks.
Rice Robotics
Describing Rice as “your friendly neighborhood robot,” Lee hopes it will help the hospitality sector deal with labor shortages as the population grows, requiring post-pandemic sanitation protocols.
“Even post-Covid, people are paying more attention to communication,” says Lee. He believes that this type of delivery robot will continue to grow in the next five to 10 years.
The epidemic robot boom
With a logistics background, Lee founded Rice Robotics in 2019 to solve the challenge of “last mile delivery”.
Supported by the Cyberport Incubation Program, Lee and his team developed the first of the three robots, Rice. Designed to deliver goods, it can be used in healthcare, retail, logistics and hospitality.
Dorset’s Wanchai Hotel will start using rice robots in June 2021. “It’s a good way to serve our guests and maintain our service standards while respecting social distancing and anti-epidemic measures,” said General Manager Anita Chan. Feedback from guests has been positive: “With its cute appearance, Rice Robot is especially loved by children.”
During the outbreak, the Dorset Wanchai Hotel in Hong Kong introduced a team of high-tech robots, including droids for cleaning and sanitizing and Roos for contactless room service.
Dorset Wanchai
Lee said customers began asking about cleaning robots during the outbreak. His team responded by developing a second robot, Jasmine, within eight weeks. Replacing Rice’s dispenser with a disinfectant solution, Jasmine has two spray nozzles to spray disinfectant over her head.
Lee created a new persona for Jasmine — already deployed in malls, conference centers and airports — by giving her cartoon eyebrows a serious expression. “She has to go out and clean the whole place, and she doesn’t want anyone to get in her way,” Lee says.
The group’s third product is Portal, a tall robot with a touch screen, two-way intercom and streaming cameras to protect public spaces. In addition to delivery, the portal can also direct visitors to places like shopping malls, conference centers, and hospitals.
Hospitality robots
While industrial robots are common in the automotive, manufacturing and electronics sectors, until recently most robots in the hospitality industry were used for innovative purposes.
The pandemic has changed that, said Kaye Chon, dean of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
In response to travel and social restrictions, “there has been a displacement of workers in our industry,” Chon says. Coupled with hygiene concerns and growing acceptance of smart technology from younger customers, Chon sees robotics as the next step in the hospitality industry’s “digital transformation.”
However, the technology still needs to overcome some hurdles to achieve the same efficiency as industrial robots. The cost of this technology is still high — Rice Robotics products sell for more than $9,000 per unit — and malls, hotels and restaurants will have to adapt to be robot-friendly, Chon says.
Workers need to know how to prepare robots for the skill sets that are lacking in the industry. To fix this, Chon has designed a new “smart tourism” curriculum that covers AI, robotics and big data, but says it will take time for current students to enter the workforce. “This is how our industry is growing,” he added.
Portal, Rice Robotics’ third product, will be on display at the Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention Center, equipped with touchscreens, two-way intercoms and streaming cameras to protect public spaces like Captain C’s.
Rice Robotics
Rice Robotics has created a fleet management application for users, and helps customers make infrastructure changes, such as programming robots and elevator systems to communicate with each other. The startup offers its robots as a monthly subscription service, starting at $800 per unit, which includes technical and on-site support.
And while robots help reduce human contact, they still need to be cleaned by workers between uses, Chon says.
Chon sees a huge opportunity for robots to perform simple, repetitive tasks in budget and mid-range hotels — but the technology is still a long way from replicating the “little personal touches” that high-end luxury properties sell themselves, he said. .
Rapid expansion
Robots like Rhys can help reduce costs and increase efficiency in “last mile delivery,” Lee said.
Rice Robotics
Rice Robotics quickly expanded from a three-person team at the time of the outbreak to 26 in 2019. Now located in the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, the company will open an office in Japan in 2021 to manage its growing customer base. With a rapidly aging population, they say robots are essential to supporting Japan’s retail and hospitality sectors.
Beyond hospitality, Lee sees robots becoming more commonplace in our homes. In a recent project with the Japan Postal Service, several rice units were deployed in a single-story building to help deliver packages and mail to residents’ doorsteps.
“Robots are not taking people’s jobs, instead they are trying to help society move,” Lee says, “Robots are the future.”
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