LG Electronics (LG) is putting into service a number of Airport Guide Robots and Airport Cleaning Robots at South Korea’s Incheon International Airport (IIA) assist travellers arriving and departing the country during next year’s Winter Olympics.
The Airport Guide Robot will roam the airport providing information and assistance to visitors while the Airport Cleaning Robot will be on hand to keep the floors impeccably clean.
While the robots went officially went into service on Friday, they have been a familiar presence to frequent travellers since February, when they began beta testing at IIA. LG engineers have been fine tuning the robots for the past five months, improving their performance based on the data and experience collected during the trial.
The Airport Guide Robot is equipped with LG’s voice recognition platform and understands four different languages – Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese – the four most popular languages spoken at the airport, in order to provide assistance verbally.
“The robot can connect to the airport’s central server to provide information regarding boarding time and locations of restaurants, shops, and much more. With a quick scan of a boarding pass, the Airport Guide Robot can escort the late or lost traveller to the right departure gate on time,” LG said.
The Airport Cleaning Robot, on the other hand, takes LG HOM-BOT’s powerful cleaning performance, autonomous navigation, and object-avoidance capability and applies them to a commercial, public environment. This robot detects the areas that require the most frequent cleaning, stores those locations in its database and calculates the most efficient routes to get there,” it added.
“LG is dedicated to the advancement and development of its robot technologies which includes navigation, voice recognition, natural language processing, and of course, DeepThinQ,” said Song Dae-hyun, president of LG Electronics Home Appliance & Air Solutions Company. “It is this kind of effort and innovation that will drive LG forward in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
Approximately 57 million travellers pass through the airport every year.
