Today, an Airport Guide Robot and an Airport Cleaning Robot start working at South Korea’s biggest international airport. LG Electronics is providing Incheon International Airport (IIA), two new automated helpers, one will assist travelers, the other will maintain the terminal neat and clean. LG provided a glimpse of this robotic lineup back at CES 2017, LG’s new robotic lineup includes the Hub Robot, Airport Guide Robot, Airport Cleaning Robot, and the Lawn Mowing Robot. Since February the Airport Guide Robot and Airport Cleaning Robot were deployed for beta testing inside IIA, LG’s engineers collected data and found patterns to give the robots a fine adjustment towards its start of trial service today.
The Airport Guide Robot will give information to users about almost everything inside the building. The robot connects to the airport database so it knows about boarding times, flight status, locations of airlines, restaurants, shops and plenty other useful data that visitors normally consult. He understands the four most common languages spoken at the airport: Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese, of course, powered by LG’s voice recognition. And if someone is lost, by scanning the boarding pass it will accompany the person to the correct location. The Airport Cleaning Robot is based on the current home models of LG vacuum cleaners: the HOM-BOT. This platform has been adjusted to provide public services, giving it features such as a quiet clean performance, independent navigation, and object detection a tweak to match IIA needs. The cleaning robot keeps information about every pass he makes, he will be able to predict places that need more cleaning than others and which is the best path to reach every area as well.
At the moment it’s estimated that around 57 million people pass through IIA each year, with South Korea being the host of the 2018 Winter Olympics, a ton of new visitors will arrive in the Asian country. Fortunately, with the help of the new “employees”, the experience in the airport will be more efficient and enjoyable. According to the president of LG Electronics Home Appliance & Air Solutions Company, Song Dae-Hyun: “LG is dedicated to the advancement and development of its robot technologies which includes navigation, voice recognition, and natural language processing”. With this statement, LG is expressing its desire to grow its robotic business to commercial clients who want to automate some tasks and give its end customer a modern and effective service.
