"로봇, 더이상 공상과학 아냐…'1인1봇'시대 머지않아" [Original Article]

These days, the easiest place to encounter service robots is in restaurants. Robots bring food from the kitchen to the customer’s table and carry empty dishes. They are popular with restaurant owners who want to reduce labor costs due to rising prices. Many companies that have actually entered the service robot business are putting restaurant serving robots at the forefront, as they have a high proportion of small businesses and are easy to introduce.

Kim Byeong-su ROBOTIS (108490) The CEO’s gaze was turned to hotels, not ordinary restaurants. He judged that hotels are the areas where the introduction of robots can have the greatest effect, and that it is also advantageous to quantify the effects. He said, “In order to get business partners to use robots, it is important to analyze the economic effects, but it is not easy to figure that out.” He added, “In the case of restaurants, the steps that can be solved among the various service steps such as guiding customers to their seats, ordering, and serving are limited to one or two steps.” He added, “In the case of hotels, the number of personnel needed at night is often in decimal units, but since they cannot split people, they end up having to assign one person entirely, which leads to inefficiency.” He explained, “I thought that robots could solve that problem, and I was able to clearly show the effects of introducing robots by presenting specific statistical figures to customers.”

CEO Kim emphasized that the robot industry must apply cool-headed criteria to figure out the actual effects. Since the concept of robots is always accompanied by a science fiction context, it is easy to focus on ‘showy marketing’ rather than the actual effects that they will bring to everyday life.

ROBOTIS, which is introducing 'GAEMI' as its indoor service robot lineup, is preparing to attack the office market following the hotel market. In preparation for the introduction of robots in offices, it is currently collaborating with Seoul City Hall to deploy one GAEMI in the city hall building to respond to calls from employees and deliver documents or packages. Unlike general service robots, this model has arms that allow it to ride elevators and move items to the employees' desks. CEO Kim predicted, "There are 40,000 hotels nationwide, but there are about 750,000 general office buildings, so if service robots expand to the office market in the future, the related market size will rapidly increase."

The service accuracy of GAEMI deployed in hotels started at 70% and is currently approaching 99.8%. On the other hand, the verification project underway at Seoul City Hall is still in the 70% range. This is because the office environment is different from that of a hotel, and it is still learning about unexpected variables. CEO Kim expects to complete a self-driving solution specialized for office buildings within this year.

CEO Kim predicted that the day when robots will naturally permeate our daily lives like shared kickboards will not be far off. He said, “If mobility is added to the common AI speaker, it will be no different from a social robot in concept, and the era of one robot per person, where such robots will enter our daily lives, will soon arrive,” and emphasized that “As the difficult problems in the fields of communications and intelligence are solved during the commercialization process, the era of robots will accelerate even further in the future.”