At this week’s National Restaurant Show, hospitality robotics startup Bear Robotics unveiled a new bot targeted at multi-floor commercial and residential spaces.
Called Servi Lift, the new robot incorporates several firsts for a Bear product, including an interactive touch screen, security doors, a large video display screen for advertising, and mobile app integration.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Lift is the integration with commercial and residential security and elevator systems. While Bear is keeping the details quiet for now, the Lift is designed to navigate through office building community “gates” and call and operate elevators. My guess is the Lift likely requires a reasonably modern building system to enable direct integrations (I can’t see the Lift calling an elevator in some of those old NYC elevators, even some of the electric ones).
The Lift also features an automatic charging station to dock between deliveries. In the Lift intro video below, you can see the charging station situated in the dining area. It’s not hard to envision how new or recently retrofitted hospitality spaces in the future will have banks of robot charging stations as the reliance on automation in service roles grows.
The Lift also has a number of consumer interaction features, including app integration, the ability to notify customers they’ve arrived via phone call, and an on-robot touch screen where consumers can enter security passcodes to access their deliveries. While the interaction flow visualization looks seamless in the video above, my guess is that operator employees will accompany the robot in early deployments to make sure it arrives at its destination and the consumer experience is good.
Bear Robotics COO Juan Higueros teased the new delivery bot was on its way when I caught up with him in March: Higueros said the company plans to create a robot model that can travel to multiple floors in a building and create a larger model robot with additional carrying capacity. Beyond that, he said the company is also starting to think about other ways to bring automation to restaurants to help make the lives of service industry workers easier.
While the company was showing off a prototype of the Servi Lift in their booth at the National Restaurant Show this week, it’s not immediately clear when production units will be commercially available.
You can watch the Lift concept video below:
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