China is taking us to the future. Lu Dike who owns a restaurant in a shopping mall in Ningbo, China (a city in the northeastern Zhejiang province), has installed robot waiters in place of humans. A move he says will save him money in the long haul. Even though each robot costs just over $9,400.
The robots, which have a lifespan of five years, run on rechargeable batteries that last up to eight hours. They are fully automated, can take orders and even speak with customers using a 40 phrase Mandarin vocabulary. The bots travel along magnetic strips in the floor, while using an optical sensing system, designed to prevent them from bumping into walls or people.
Li says that he is asked if he would like to sell one of them at least once per day. “Who knows? Maybe it might be a good sideline,” says the restaurant owner.
Source: Fox News
Meanwhile, one of Singapore’s most popular restaurant chains, Timbre Group, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Infinium Robots to install flying waiters, known as Infinium Serve, in five restaurant outlets by the end of 2015. That’s right, FLYING waiters. See below:
This is expected to be the world’s first commercial attempt at replacing humans with drones as waiters. Woon Junyang, chief executive officer at Infinium Robotics, said he believes that replacing waiters and waitresses with robots would help alleviate Singapore’s labor crunch and allow human waiters to focus on more interesting higher value tasks, such as getting feedback from customers and ordering wine.
“This will result in an enhanced dining experience which will eventually lead to increased sales and revenue for the restaurants,” Woon said. Singapore has an ongoing labor shortage, especially in the service sector, because of ever increasing restrictions in the number of foreign workers allowed.
Infinium demonstrated a prototype of the flying robot to Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong during the launch of National Productivity Month in October.
So, are you ready to move into the future? Ready or not, here it comes. Personally, I think it’s pretty cool!!
Source: rt.com
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